The Nice Little Blonde Girl

Lily Kovner, nicknamed the Jewish Miss Marple, accidentally spies a familiar-looking painting hanging in the unlikely setting of a shabby restaurant in Vatican City. Simon Rieger, her significant other, has been summoned to examine a previously unknown manuscript, attributed to a famous Talmudic scholar, unaccountably stored there.

A suspicious death and the disappearance of both the painting and manuscript lead Lily and Simon to Lviv, Ukraine, newly freed from Soviet rule but a city lacking vestiges of the vibrant Jewish community that thrived there for centuries before World War II and isolation behind the Iron Curtain.

Lily recalls her one pre-war childhood visit to this city then known as Lw�w, Poland, and wonders if any of the relatives she met survived the Holocaust. The trail of the manuscript and painting provides early clues. Ultimately, the path reveals a modern woman's saga of solitary resiliance, despite the treachery of perpetrators professing to be holy, that mirrors a centuries-old local legend of a Jewish heroine who saved a landmark synagogue.