A Room Full of Night

One night in Wuttke, Wis., former journalist Stag Maguire, the hero of the pseudonymous Kenneth’s middling debut, visits his closest friend, Harry Gerde, at Gerde’s Biergarten, which is about to go out of business, to commiserate over their misfortunes. Stag’s wife recently died in a mass shooting at a Starbucks. A portrait of a man in Bavarian attire above the bar that Harry wants to save—rumored to have “hung in the Berghof and... given to Gerde’s by a marauding G.I. Joe after the war”—turns out to have a piece of silk in its lining with the words help me in German and a Berlin street address written upon it. Further investigation reveals that the original subject of the painting was painted over—and was none other than Reinhard Heydrich, a main architect of the Holocaust. Stag’s call to the apartment building at the Berlin address sets in motion events that lead to murder, and to his pursuit of an organization that may be the successor to Heydrich’s dreaded security service. Kenneth piles on the contrivances as amateurs foil master assassins. Fans of over-the-top thrillers with apocalyptic stakes may be satisfied. (Mar.)