This book grabs you from page one and never lets you go. It starts off with a bus ride and a Nazi Rudolph Bormann making the trip up from South America to Kansas and meeting up with fellow German Jacob Meyer who helps him set up a life in Paradise Flats. The two will form a ranch together and raise children though Rudolph, now Rudy Goodman's wife will die in childbirth with the third child. For the most part, he keeps his children out of his business. Such as experimenting on humans like he did in the camps. Then he gets hit by lightning and decides to start a church where he "heals" people and starts a flock of believers of the "purity doctrine". His son Heimleich helps to run the church.
But then someone recognizes him and calls the Roan Foundation a group that hunts down Nazis and other assorted bad guys. They sent Ransom Roan the head of the foundation but he disappeared. So his son Dr. Travis Roan has arrived to find out what has happened to his father and to find out what this elderly woman has to say. Then it turns out the woman is dead. As are two other local people who have been brutally murdered. Someone has experimented on them before killing them.
Travis has met state trooper Skottie Foster who is the only black female officer on the state trooper roster. She agrees to go out to meet the elderly woman. Instead, they meet with her daughter and uncover a diary she left behind for her daughter detailing her experiences with Bormann when she was a guard at Ravenbrook but went to Mauthausen-Gusen to send some prisoners there as prostitutes and came under the scrutiny of the "wolf" Bormann. She doesn't read the whole thing to him which is in their special code because it's too painful but promises to read more to them later.
Travis and his dog, Bear, have come to the attention of the local sheriff Goodman, a racist against every race including his own at times, who tries to use force against him to warn him off and winds up on the ground having it used against him. But when Bear finds one of the bodies in the lake he is arrested by Goodman and his deputy Plunket who are both attacked by Bear
first. More like knocked over by Bear before Travis calls him off and tells him to disappear. They arrest Travis for no real reason other than that they don't like him and hold him for the maximum amount of time they can hold him. Skottie meanwhile has agreed to take Bear home with her to her mother's home with her ten-year-old daughter Maddy who immediately falls in love with Bear. But Travis isn't done looking into the Nazi case and now he's looking into the church angle too. And Skottie is getting pissed at being told to back off and leave this alone by everyone so she's helping him especially when things go sideways and the bad guys get serious who they'll hurt.
This is an excellent read that just flies right by and will keep you up nights reading it. I love the characters of Travis who's been through so much and is filled with so much anger and is trying to control it and keep a cool head and think ahead of the bad guy. Also, Skottie who must deal with her estranged husband who has decided to just now making an appearance and her stubborn mother and her precocious daughter who can't go a day without getting in trouble at school. The plot seems fantastical but not too much to be plausible. I really loved this book and I gi\ve it five out of five stars.
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