Blood Ties

Blood Ties is Warren Adler’s 1979 family-secrets novel, the kind of slow-build identity thriller that was common in the late 1970s and almost vanished from American shelves after about 1985. Albert Pedlock, a fully assimilated American Jewish corporate lawyer, accompanies his wife to a Bavarian wedding for her German cousin. What begins as social discomfort about being a Jewish guest in a former Reich household becomes an actual investigation when Pedlock discovers a family photograph that should not exist and a German uncle who is not quite who he claims.

Adler is unhurried with this one. The first hundred pages are mostly social discomfort and observation: the way assimilation looks from inside a Catholic Bavarian dinner, the specific ways Pedlock’s wife’s family is gracious in ways that almost hide what they will not say. The thriller plot, when it arrives, is more interior than physical: the question is not whether Pedlock will survive but what he will do with what he learns. The ending is morally messier than the genre usually offers.

Recommended for fans of late-1970s American-Jewish identity fiction (Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife) and for readers looking for books like Blood Ties that treat Holocaust legacy as living inside ordinary domestic life. Three stars, with the Bavarian opening earning the extra half.