title: A High and Hidden Place: A Novel
author: Michele Lucas
description: While watching television in the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination, journalist Christine Lenoir witnesses Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. This traumatic experience opens the floodgates of memory, causing her to wonder what in her sheltered French childhood could have produced such shadowy images of gunshots, fire and death. Raised by nuns since the age of six, Christine has always believed that her parents died in an influenza epidemic, but as she gradually pieces her childhood together, she learns that her family members were killed in the June 10, 1944, massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, a French village just outside of Limoges. On that day, German soldiers rounded up 642 men, women and children in the village and killed them for no apparent reason. Lucas, a first-time novelist, does a fine job of blending her extensive research into Oradour's history with the story of the fictional character Christine, who escaped the massacre because she was playing in the woods. At times, the novel's shifting time frames can be disorienting, switching too often between the present in 1964, the wartime massacre nearly twenty years before, and the near past in 1963. However, the characterizations are haunting, and readers will feel compelled to turn the pages to find out whether Christine will be able to heal from the terrible burden of knowing her family's fate. In particular, Lucas does an outstanding job of weaving Catholic themes and faith through the book, daring to ask the unanswerable, age-old questions about God, suffering and the human capacity for evil. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: **The State Room**
  
  by
  
  **Annabel Lucas**
  
  No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an
  information retrieval system in any form or by any means, without prior
  written permission from the author.
  
  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real
  people, or real places are used fictionally. Other names, characters, places,
  and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to
  actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
  
  _All rights reserved._
  
  **Copyright © (2021)**
  
  **Annabel Lucas**
  
  To Camille.
  
  _CHAPTER 1_
  
  _CHAPTER 2_
  
  _CHAPTER 3_
  
  _CHAPTER 4_
  
  _CHAPTER 5_
  
  _CHAPTER 6_
  
  _CHAPTER 7_
  
  _CHAPTER 8_
  
  _CHAPTER 9_
  
  _CHAPTER 10_
  
  _CHAPTER 11_
  
  _CHAPTER 12_
  
  _CHAPTER 13_
  
  _CHAPTER 14_
  
  Chapter 1
  
  The world beyond the window blurred before her eyes, reduced to flashes of
  green and white. She knew the landscape consisted of evergreen trees buried
  under the recent snow. She did not know if 