Brotherhood of Fear: A Willi Kraus Novel

Grossman’s third historical maintains the high quality of its predecessor, 2012’s Children of Wrath. With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Willi Kraus, Germany’s top homicide detective, flees to Paris to avoid persecution as a Jew. In exile, he does what he can without a work permit to support his family. Kraus gets a reprieve from making fox stoles when a seedy PI asks him to tail Philippe Junot, a student from an affluent family. Though Victoir Orsini, Paris’s police commissioner, warmly receives Kraus, no job offer follows from their meeting. Instead, the exile’s surveillance assignment makes him a witness to murder, and proves to be the first step in an intricate chain of events that includes a Madoff-like fraud and an elaborate conspiracy. Grossman again manages to make the past come alive, and his complicated investigator displays enough depth and frailty to warrant continued exploits, even without the series’ initial hook of a Jewish cop fighting for justice under the Nazis. Agent: Jon Sternfeld, Irene Goodman Agency. (Feb.)