Paris After the Storm

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Catalina Santorini

William Ian Grubman opens his sequel in the back seat of a Paris police car, February 1948, wrists shackled, rain sliding down the windows, a detective who says nothing turning to look at the narrator with disdain. Then he takes you back five months, to the Napoleon III Apartments at the Louvre, where the youngest Director of Restorations the museum has ever had notices something wrong with a Renoir. That structural choice tells you everything about how this novel is built: elegant, patient, and completely in control of what it reveals and when.

Paris After the Storm deepens and expands the world Grubman established in The Storm Over Paris, and the expansion feels entirely earned. The Rothstein family, Jewish art restorers navigating post-war Paris with the particular mix of relief and residual grief that liberation does not erase, are rendered with the warmth and specificity of people the author has spent a long time living alongside in his imagination. Émile carrying his sleeping son Porter through the galleries of the Louvre while trying to solve the mystery of a missing Renoir. Jacob, with his limp and his double degrees in economics and accounting, whose sharp eye at a gallery on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré catches something that will change everything. The Shabbat dinner where Ruth lights candles more out of tradition than faith because, as she quietly understands, if there was a God, how could all those people have perished?

That question sits underneath the entire book. Post-war Paris is rendered here not as the romantic city of recovery it is sometimes made to appear, but as a place still sorting through what was taken, what can be returned, and what is simply gone. The looted art flowing through the Napoleon apartments, the bureaucratic machinery of repatriation, the moral questions about who has the right to what, all of it is woven into a thriller plot that moves with considerable sophistication toward an ending that closes one loop and opens another beautifully.

Grubman writes with the eye of someone who loves art deeply and the instincts of a novelist who understands that what makes a thriller work is not the mystery itself but the people trying to solve it.

For fans of the first book and for anyone drawn to intelligent, beautifully rendered historical fiction with genuine emotional weight, this is exactly the continuation they were hoping for.

About the Author

William Ian Grubman

Artist, art collector, and philanthropist author William Ian Grubman is devoted to giving his readers fast-paced, high-stakes adventures with characters they’ll remember long after the last page. An avid student of art history, Grubman served as a docent for the Armand Hammer collection, lecturing on 18th and 19th century master paintings and drawings. Through this experience, the seed of his first novel, The Storm Over Paris, was born. 

The Storm Over Paris won the 2019 Indie Reader Discovery Award in Mystery/Thriller/Suspense and was a finalist for the 2019 National Indie Excellence Award.

When William isn’t writing, he dedicates his time to the Dream Street Foundation, a non-profit organization he co-founded with his sister to provide summer camping programs for children with life threatening and chronic illnesses. He’s also a founding member of ACT THREE, a musical theater trio that performs standards from Broadway, Jazz, and The Great American Song Book. 

William lives in Los Angeles and has two children – a future doctor and a future lawyer, he beams proudly. Visit his website at www.williamgrubman.com.