PRODIGAL SONS

An Israeli secret agent hunts Nazi war criminals in this rich psychological thriller.

By day, he’s Horst Vogle, a mild-mannered curator and a Wehrmacht veteran with the shrapnel scars to prove it. By night, he’s Jan Goldberg, an undercover Israeli assassin and a Polish Jew who got those scars blowing up German transports with a partisan band during World War II and then battling Arabs with the Haganah. After a day spent poring over art catalogs, Horst/Jan heads out into a dark and still-dilapidated Munich, circa 1950, to shoot and garrote his targets, leaving behind photos of them in their SS uniforms to underscore the point. He considers these assignments a just payback for the murder of his family, but he’s starting to have misgivings. Fueling them is Horst’s relationship with Greta, a beautiful young pianist who reminds him of his sister. She introduces him to her friends at the Kultur Bund, a crypto-Nazi organization publicly dedicated to building the New Germany while it secretly uses stolen art and gold looted from Jews to fund terrorism. With his fair hair, Nordic looks and steadiness under pressure, they consider Horst such fine Aryan stock that they try to recruit him. Jan’s handler is eager for him to infiltrate the group, but the effort adds a new and fraught layer of duplicity to his already tangled double life. Greene (Burnt Umber, 2001, etc.) keeps the action flowing with gripping battle and heist scenes and taut hitman procedural, but he also makes readers care about his characters. Even the Bund-ers are three-dimensional people with hidden complexities. Horst/Jan may be a killer, but he’s never coldblooded–in his longing for a home in a Germany that he’s sworn to wreak vengeance upon, he’s a fascinating study of the rootlessness of the Holocaust survivor.

A page-turner with emotional depth.