The Vienna Writers Circle

Maetis (Murder in Manhattan, as John Matthews) draws on the milieu of Sigmund Freud for a well-crafted Holocaust story. In the late 1920s, Freud forms a group of psychiatrists, writers, and other intellectuals to share ideas. But in 1938, after the Anschluss, membership in “Freud’s Circle” proves risky, as Nazi officials seeking to identify Jews for deportation use old photos of the Circle to do so. Jewish cousins Mathias Kraemer and Johannes Namal, crime novelists and Circle members, are alarmed when SS officer Heinrich Schnabel enters the Cafe Mozart where they’re seated and demands that the Jews present make themselves known to him. Turns out the net is tightening around the cousins. (A prologue, set in 1942, previews doom for at least one of the protagonists with a view of a railway car filled with the dead, the dying, and the sick.) With solid prose and thoughtful characterizations, Maetis ratchets up the suspense as Schabel searches for Jews and the cousins’ efforts to avoid capture gets an assist from a secret ring that provides those in danger with new identities. Historical fiction fans will be pleased. (Feb.)