My Lethal Obsession

Blending family drama with page-turning suspense, My Lethal Obsession confronts the eternal hatred one group has faced throughout history in very human, very personal terms, and honors the unbreakable will to survive and begin anew.

Gideon Wistreich is haunted by visions of his family’s persecution across generations. His visions compel him to abandon his ambition to become a lawyer and embark on a quest to understand why his family, and Jews as a people, have been targets of hatred for millennia. On a deeply personal level, Gideon is tortured by survivor’s guilt, struggling to answer why his grandfather chose to flee east at the outset of World War II. The decision led to imprisonment by the Russians in a gulag in Siberia—yet ultimately saved his immediate family—while many of their educated and accomplished relatives who remained in Poland perished.

Gideon’s relentless search for truth ultimately places him in the crosshairs of a Cardinal destined to become the next Pope, inciting an encounter that will impact Gideon’s family forever. The modern-day narrative and characters are fictional and the earlier generations are creatively drawn from real people and events recorded in family memoirs, which describe those who survived, and those who did not.