‘Found Wanting’ wants only for a better last line

Robert Goddard’s “Found Wanting” was a compelling read from the first few pages.

English civil servant Richard Eusden is intercepted on his way to work by his ex-wife, Gemma. It’s about Marty — her second ex-husband and Richard’s former best friend — to whom she has promised a favor she wants Richard to fulfill. He’s not exactly so inclined, considering his fraught relationship with Marty during the latter’s marriage to and divorce from Gemma and in the years since, which also included a stretch in prison for Marty. But then she plays the guilt card: Marty is dying.

And so off Richard goes, abandoning the Foreign Office and everything he considers normal in his life. It will, after all, be simply a day trip to Brussels and back. Right?

First, he must make a stop, to pick up a mysterious satchel that's been in Marty's family for generations. Then he is to travel to Brussels to meet Marty, but an emissary turns up instead. Driven by a mix of loyalty to a boyhood friend and curiosity about the contents of the satchel and what Marty’s gotten himself into this time, Richard finds himself traveling first to Cologne and then to Hamburg, and then through most of Scandinavia.

Along the way, he crosses paths with a powerful, inscrutable and, most of all, megalomaniacal Scandinavian industrialist, and learns that Marty’s grandfather had something to do with rumors surrounding the fate of the two youngest children of Tzar Nicholas of Russia, Anastasia and Alexei Nikolaievich, who, some would have it, may have survived the slaughter of their family. Was Anna Anderson really Anastasia? Inquiring minds want to know.

The story is as circuitous as Richard’s route through Western Europe, and at times I couldn’t even keep track of which Scandinavian country he was in when, where various members of the industrialist’s family were born, and so on. Still, it was quite a ride, over and through plenty of mystery.

I particularly liked the graphics that set off each chapter: A line drawing of a battered leather satchel, and the name of the city — in the native language — to which Richard is traveling. Somehow, it made it a little easier to follow his path.

One quibble: I absolutely hated the last line, which echoes the book’s title. I won’t spoil it for you, but it has to do with the name of a detective who had been dispatched long ago to try to find the siblings. It has an overwhelmingly — and unfortunately — contrived feel, and is the only part of the whole book that does.