Introduction

On the night of October 9, 1799, the frigate HMS Lutine breaks apart on the shoals of the Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast. When the insurer Lloyds of London pays on the wreck, it takes ownership and plans expeditions to recoup the lost millions in gold and silver. Nearly two hundres years later, after a series of largely failed salvage operations, Lloyds tries again - this time on the strength of new technologies and a strategy devised by the gifted young engineer Henri Poincare.

It is late spring, 1978. Poincare has worked to near-exhaustion preparing for the Lutine dive. Before the salvage season begins, he takes a rare holiday: a hike at low tide across the vast, muddy flats of the Wadden Sea. His guide is Liesel Kraus - smart, able, appealing...and troubled. She and her brother Anselm, directors of Kraus Steel, are haunted by a violent history that generates both rage and an enormous, corrupting wealth. The closer Poincare draws to Liesel and Anselm, the more warped life becomes until love and a death threat compel him to investigate what no one else - aside from Interpol - will. Pain as well as treasure, he discovers, can be dredged up from the past to reshape the present.

The Tenth Witness, a prequel to the award-winning All Cry Chaos, is the tale of a man upended: a twenty-eight year old who rejects a brilliant career in engineering for an uncertain, darker one: international police work.

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Discussion Questions

• This is a first-person narrative, with Henri Poincaré speaking. You meet him as an older man in the first chapter, and you stay with him as he recalls his younger self, thirty years earlier. How do you respond to this narrator? How would you describe his voice?

• Every novel is set in a place that is more or less important to the story. In these opening chapters, you read of the Wadden mudflats and the flat, green landscape of Terschelling. What are the key features of this particular place? What about the Wadden Sea and Terschelling mark them as a setting suitable for the playing out of a mystery/thriller?

• You can often find the kernels of an entire novel in its opening pages. Consider chapter one of The Tenth Witness. Based on your reading, what do you anticipate are the ideas and tensions that will come into play as the novel unfolds?

• What do you make of the relationship between Henri and Liesel?

• What elements in the story create a sense of foreboding?

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»	Author Leonard Rosen's web site
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