DAS FRÄULEIN UND RAPHAEL

Hitler’s ideal woman seduces and kills to survive World War II and its aftermath in this historical thriller.

Blond, svelte, and the niece of an SS Obergruppenführer, 17-year-old Kathryn Steiner is the epitome of Aryan femininity in the Germany of 1938. She’s also a rabid anti-Semite after being raped by a Jewish man whom she promptly killed by ramming a letter opener into his rectum. That trauma makes her an ardent Nazi with a coldly instrumental attitude toward sex that can quickly turn murderous. Seeking advancement, she becomes the mistress of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the real-life Gestapo chief and Holocaust architect, who gifts her with a $1.7 million Swiss bank account and shooting lessons at SS sniper school. These come in handy when Kathryn flees Germany in 1945 and goes to the United States while embroiling herself in “Odessa,” a clandestine movement to spirit SS war criminals to Argentina. Her schemes center on Portrait of a Young Man, a painting by Raphael that in real life was stolen from Poland by the Nazis and never seen again. Kathryn tracks Portrait to Brooklyn and conceives a complex caper involving a Roman Catholic monsignor, the police, and a mob boss to deliver it to the pope in exchange for church assistance for Odessa fugitives. Further adventures take Kathryn to Moscow as a CIA agent tasked with seducing a Russian official who keeps a list of Soviet spies in his safe, but not before she spends a lengthy portion of the novel in law school. Along the way, she avidly kills a number of ill-behaved men, including drunken Wehrmacht soldiers; menacing Russian soldiers; SS Hauptsturmführer Thomas Richter, who tries to blackmail her; and would-be rapists.

Peterson’s yarn mixes a war and espionage saga with heavily interpreted historical figures and events. His scenes of mayhem are evocative and intense—“Kathryn heard the terrifying sounds of the machine guns and could see people falling….the woman next to her received a direct hit in the head and was decapitated.” Military history buffs will like the tale’s tutorials, though they are often delivered as stiff, expositional dialogue. (“In January, Adolf Hitler gave my uncle the command of Army Group Vistula…which was to provide the frontline defense of Berlin against Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front,” says Kathryn at her law school admissions interview.) Kathryn is an arresting femme fatale, and watching her in action is often a treat. But her flirting isn’t the subtlest—“Take your clothes off and show me the length and girth of your penis”—and her feminine wiles can feel like a Gestapo interrogation. (“The two passionately kissed and groped, all the while Kathryn querying Anderson, ‘In what part of New York are your parents living? Are they aware of the item that you sent?’ ”) Worse, Kathryn doesn’t do much that’s important. The story is full of long, repetitive procedural scenes of her buying train tickets, ordering white wine, shopping, or filling out forms in contexts that lack any stakes. The narrative bogs down in endless rehashes of plans, travel arrangements, and back stories as new characters are laboriously apprised of plot points that readers already know about. The result is a thin tale filled out with much redundant padding.

A historically well-informed, overstuffed potboiler in which sex and death get lost in trivia.