THE LAST NAZI

Chutzpah: a no-good Nazi offing a nice Jewish boy, then swiping his identity for over half a century.

Adalwolf is the name that Nazi-hunter Melissa Gale knows him by, the monster she’s been chasing for five fruitless years. He frustrates and embitters her. Nor does he do her career a lot of good. Early in the story, an Adalwolf misadventure leads to Melissa’s suspension from a high-level job in the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations. Additional dismal things she knows about Adalwolf: he’s cunning, arrogant, vindictive, devilishly smart, and elusive as hell. Most important, she knows that he was the foster son of Dr. Josef Mengeles, infamous for the “procedures” he performed on Jewish inmates of Auschwitz before sending them on to Crematorium V. As a teenaged monster of 16, Adalwolf was the diabolical doctor’s eager surgical assistant. What Melissa doesn’t know about Adalwolf—though the reader does—is that for 56 years he’s been masquerading as Professor Ben Ben-Levi, world-class fertility specialist and father-figure/mentor to Melissa, who’s been trying desperately to get pregnant. She adores gentle Ben-Levi, trusts him, depends on him—and then is shockingly betrayed by him at a time when she could hardly have been more vulnerable. But for Adalwolf, the time is propitious indeed, because, with her unwitting help, his wicked secret agenda can at last be activated. No less virulent than he was at Auschwitz, he plans to launch a Jewish plague: a killer virus engineered to be selective—with Melissa’s baby, like Rosemary’s, to be the incubator of unspeakable evil. Aroused, Melissa goes on the attack: mother versus monster, a vengeful, fire-breathing mother ready, willing, and able to play by monster rules.

Throughout, there’s a scattering of good white-knuckle moments, but with Pottinger, ever the overplotter (A Slow Burning, 2000, etc.), more continues to be less.