Hello to you all! I am hoping you can help identify a book for me, which has been long lost for years.
About 35 years ago, I used to go to a cottage in Canada every summer, and would always look forward to re-reading a paperback book that was on the shelves - until one year when all the books in the cottage had been thrown away. Sadly, despite having read the book a dozen times, I could not remember the title or author, even though I could remember the story line. I loved this book, a mystery which involved genealogy and revenge across generations.
What I remember is that there were two fellows, lets call them A and B. A was doing geneaology research in New England, trying to find descendants of another fellow, lets call him C. A seemed to be relieved every time he met a “dead end” on whether a certain family line from C had died out. In fact, A met a woman and seemed to be thinking about settling down with her, because his geneaological search for C’s descendants was coming up cold.
Eventually, however, A found out that one of C’s family lines had not petered out, and there was a certain fellow, B, who was the descendant of C. The book told B’s story separately, and you were never sure what A had to do with B. During the story, B would occasionally wake up full of fear and hear a wooshing sound.
It ended up that B had killed A in a prior life (like, B was actually C in a prior life, and had killed A in a prior life, so A was searching for B because B was really the re-born soul of C). A was searching for C’s descendent to exact revenge for his (A’s) own prior murder by C in a prior life. When A finally found descendant B, A left his woman friend, knowing he could not settle down with her and instead had to murder B. A murdered B after forging a knife blade. The wooshing sound was A whipping the blade back and forth in the air, to increase the oxygen that would touch the red-hot metal during the forging process. I think the murder never actually happened in the book, but you learned at the very end why A was forging his knife.
I think there were also some scenes where walls of the (hotel?) room that A was staying in were covered with weird and fantastic images and words, like A was recording his dream imagery on the walls. I suspect this book had been published some years before I started reading it in about 1970-75, and that it was an American publication (even though I read it in Canada).
If the ID Squadron can nail this one I will be forever in their debt !!!