In Return from the Ashes, "we meet a woman of great wealth who returns from a concentration camp, following World War II, to her young husband and to the daughter she has had by a previous liaison. They have believed she is dead. They are determined to acquire her fortune. With the reluctant complicity of the wife, they enter into a bizarre and frightening conspiracy -- a plan that depends on the ability of the wife to enact an impossibly subtle and difficult role: that of a woman impersonating herself .... With Return from the Ashes, M. Monteilhet has given us a ... chilling study of greed, depravity and destruction that is, if anything, even more brilliant and more horrifying than his first [book, The Praying Mantises]"-- Front and back flaps.