The Final Judgement

In a first-rate thriller, Easterman (Night of the Apocalypse) dramatizes the awful power of hate and prejudice, providing readers with nonstop action and real food for thought. Israeli hotelier Aryeh Levin has a comfortable life on Sardinia's Costa Smeralda--until his 10-year-old son is kidnapped. The ransom demands are impossible to meet; then Aryeh's Sardinian lawyer, who has delivered the bad news, disappears. Desperate, Aryeh is forced to turn to his estranged brother-in-law, Yosef Abuhatseira. An ex-member of Israeli's elite antiterrorist unit, Sayaret Mathal, Yosef is a born hunter and survivor. He rescues the boy but at great cost: the lives of Aryeh and his wife. Local authorities can't put the pieces together, even though the Levins, survivors of Auschwitz, were found dressed in concentration-camp pajamas, killed by the Zyklon-B gas used in Nazi death camps. Yosef investigates on his own, with a little help from the Mossad and a lot from his interpreter, Maryam Shumayyil, a Christian Arab. The story rockets from Sardinia to Germany to northern Italy as Easterman catches readers--as well as Yosef and Maryam--up in a vast right-wing plot to bring victory to a rabid neo-Nazi organization seeking to overthrow at least two governments and return fascism to power. Timely conflicts are rife: Arabs vs. Israelis, European vs. Sephardic Israelis, German skinheads vs. guest-workers, honest cops vs. corrupt cops. With its theme of the Final Solution, the novel is riveting and chilling, and if the ending is less than rosy, it rings uncomfortably true. (Nov.)