NONFICTION : WHY MY FATHER DIED <i> by Annette Kahn (Summit Books: $19.95; 240 pp.).</i>

Brutal coincidence enabled Kahn to write this haunting book: Thirty-three years after her father, a member of the French Resistance, was shot in the back of the head by one of Klaus Barbie’s men, Kahn was dispatched to cover the trial of the Butcher of Lyon for Le Point, a French magazine. That grueling assignment prompted her to ask her mother, who had been silent all these years, to tell her the story of what happened to the Kahns during World War II. She interweaves excerpts from the trial with a mesmerizing re-creation of her family’s story, speaking of unspeakable acts in exactly the right voice: impassioned but lacking in self-pity, incensed but never self-righteous. There is an elegant economy to her language, as when she matter-of-factly describes the relative who, with the best of intentions, pleads with a bureaucrat for extra rations for Annette and her brother and inadvertently places their lives in danger. And there is a searing sense of loss. As foolish as her mother’s hopes of finding her husband still alive may be, it is impossible not to share them.