Title: Birthright
First published: 1997
Description: In this original novel, fact and fiction intertwine in a story at once suspenseful and powerfully moving. It centers on the crime of the century.

Sometimes ordinary men play major roles in a greater destiny. Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh neither know Joseph Shellenbach nor suspect that he is both the source of and the answer to the pain that has seared their lives and will haunt them for the rest of their days. They know only that someone has stolen their infant son, demanded ransom, then left behind his broken body.

What they never know, or even suspect, is that the child they buried was not theirs but that of a young couple whose own baby had died tragically hours before the kidnapping. And they therefore never know the young man, named David, who grew up the son of a devoted father named Shell and an unstable mother named Helen.

Shell locks away in the innermost darkness of his soul the secret of David's birth, guarding it with all the passion of a loving and protective father. Then comes a time of personal crisis when Shell must decide whether to tell David, now turning fifty, of his true birthright. Would David despise him? Though his real father has died, what of his real mother? Anne Lindbergh is still alive. What would the revelation of the existence of her firstborn do to her and her other children?

And would David really want them to know the truth? Would he really want to know it himself?
Subjects: Fiction, Kidnapping
Places: New Jersey
People: Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-), Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974)
LC classification: PS3553.O23 B57 1997