Triptych: A Mystery

Chicago, 1986. Ildiko, 37, a librarian and ESL teacher, the American-born daughter of Hungarian refugees, is caught in a web of guilt and regret over her mother's mystifying death. Unsettled by her life and her romantic failures, she finds herself suddenly and unexpectedly drawn back to her roots, first to the Hungarian neighborhood of her youth in Chicago—and eventually to the Russian-occupied city of Budapest. Along the way, she meets a magnetic man who may not be what he seems, uncovers a trail of secrets and betrayals that eventually intersect with the tangled knot of the mother-daughter participants in the Revolution—and she discovers the shocking truth about her mother's death.

Triptych is the suspenseful unfolding of two parallel stories of mother and daughter relationships forged in the brutalities of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Triptych is about survival, displacement, the corrosive power of secrets, and, ultimately, the healing power of forgiveness.