cover image The Nazi Hunter

The Nazi Hunter

Alan Elsner, . . Arcade, $26 (325pp) ISBN 978-1-55970-839-5

A t the start of this gripping debut thriller set in 1994, a German-accented woman named Sophie Reiner appears at the desk of Marek Cain, a Nazi hunter in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, and tells Marek that she can deliver smoking gun documents concerning Belzec, an extermination camp in Poland where half a million Jews were murdered in 1942. Marek is extremely interested, both professionally and personally: his own grandparents perished at Belzec. The next day, Sophie turns up dead in her hotel room, where the police find a CD of Argentinean baritone Roberto Delatrucha singing Schubert lieder. The possible Argentinean connection sets off alarms for the veteran investigator, and soon he's hot on the trail of the famous singer. Subplots involving neo-Nazis out to blow up Washington, and the newly elected Republican congress threatening to cut off OSI funding add suspense, but it's Marek's quest to expose Delatrucha's past that drives this compelling tale. Elsner is also the author of Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons and Guarded by Angels , a Holocaust family chronicle. (July)