NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY

Harries’ novel pits a shadowy assassination outfit against a passel of bumbling neo-Nazis—hijinks ensue.

Teddy Fisher is a failed actor and a bit of a sad sack, and he bears an uncanny resemblance to Odin Locke, Adolph Hitler’s great-grandson. A cabal of neo-Nazis wants Locke to act as a figurehead in their plot to resurrect the Reich in all its glory and do some serious world conquering this time around. The idea is that a meeting of neo-Nazi representatives will take place at the hunting preserve of one Heinrich Müller in Namibia to confirm Locke as the new Hitler figure and to plot their next moves. Teddy is recruited to impersonate Locke by a mysterious redhead named Amanda Bloom, whom he finds overwhelmingly attractive. The plan of Amanda’s CIA-adjacent outfit, the Ghost Sanction, is very simple: Kill all of these assembled clowns. Readers will hope from the start that the Congress of United Nazi Torchbearers (yes, C.U.N.T.) will go down in defeat, ignominy, and worse, and that Teddy and Amanda will come out OK—even though Amanda’s orders, per protocol, are to kill Teddy once the shenanigans are over. The fun is all in the details and the cockeyed characters, like the diminutive, screeching “Leader” whose name and origins remain obscure (he’s killed early on, anyway); Locke himself, with his complicated backstory; and Hilda Hahn, a Valkyrie-proportioned woman with the hots for Teddy. Harries, in building Amanda’s backstory, inserts a truly horrendous account of an al-Qaeda attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (“The scene in the restaurant resembled a butcher’s picnic”), in which Amanda proved her mettle. There’s nothing at all funny about that gory episode, it should be noted—when necessary, Harries is more than able to scare the life out of readers. They’ll have a hard keeping everything straight in the loopy chaos at Müller’s Namibian retreat, but that’s part of the fun, too.

Harries is clearly having a grand time here, and so will readers.