In the summer of 1973, Oda Klein is secretly preparing for a new life when her eight-year-old daughter, Vera, drowns in the neighbor's pool.

Her husband, Paul, flees their grief by taking a military posting abroad in Suriname. Seven years later, he returns and is banished to Vera's old room, where he descends deeper and deeper into the hell of his memories. When a mysterious fire burns down the neighbor's house, a young girl appears out of the flames. She is fifteen, as Vera would now have been. Paul and Oda agree to take her in temporarily -- feeling as if they have been given another chance to form a family. But her presence only makes their loss more palpable. Finally, years later, Paul's friend, Emil, reveals the central part he played in Oda's other life, the life she relinquished when her daughter died.

Oscar van den Boogaard is a masterful stylist. Both poetic and gripping, Love's Death never loosens its hold on the reader from the first painful scene by the pool to the final revelation of the deception at the heart of the Kleins' marriage