The Last Man
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
For decades Gerta Wahljak has been haunted by a photograph of ten Nazi officers taken in the concentration camp where she was imprisoned during the Holocaust. Since emigrating to the United States, she has carefully traced and recorded the fates of nine of these men. But there is one whom she has been unable to track--until now. While Gerta waits in her Boston cardiologist's office, she sees another patient who she is almost sure is the last man. She will not be at peace until she knows.
After interviewing Gerta, assistant U.S. Attorney David Keegan is shocked to learn that he is closely linked to the man he's investigating. For the man accused of being a former Nazi is none other than Frederick Schiller, married to a renowned Jewish activist and the father of the woman Keegan loves.
Poised to become U.S. attorney, Keegan suddenly finds his life maliciously uprooted. Someone envious of his rise to power will stop at nothing to ruin him . . . leaking the volatile story to the press and hoping Keegan's reputation is blackened in the firestorm.
David Keegan is a man also haunted by the past, obsessed by his quest to uncover the facts behind his mother's death when he was a child. But as he pursues the truth about his mother, he must deal with the explosive case of Frederick Schiller. As newspaper headlines hurl accusations about Schiller and his wife, the two are forced to relive a dark history that was meant to be buried forever. Now Keegan must decide whether to risk his career to help the parents of the woman he loves.
A gripping, relentlessly plotted story about the ambiguity of morality, the power of an unresolved past, and the necessity of forgiveness, The Last Man twists like a thriller, but has the truth-seeking depth of great fiction. Profound in theme and peopled with characters that possess a refreshing vitality, it is a novel that will breathlessly race you to its stunning, climactic finish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everyone seems to be haunted by the past in this competently written but overly schematic thriller. In a Boston doctor's office, Greta Wahljak stares at an old man named Schiller and recognizes him as Friedrich Schillinghausen, the last man still alive out of 10 Nazi officials who were photographed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She approaches the U.S. Attorney's office, unaware that assistant U.S. Attorney David Keegan is dating Schiller's daughter, Diane. Moreover, Keegan has his own mystery to unravel: the events surrounding the car crash in 1954 that killed his mother and spared his abusive policeman father. The demands of advancing two parallel plot lines force Kenney (The Son of John Devlin) to shortchange each of them, and the result is two plots that keep hitting melodramatic high points instead of one story told in dramatic depth. Credibility vanishes when Theo Dunbar, Keegan's rival at the U.S. Attorney's office, feeds the Schiller story to the Globeand then blames the leaks on Keegan, a falsehood that their boss doesn't question. Readers will recognize the implausibility of the situation; after recusing himself from the Schiller case, why would Keegan leak stories to the press that would damage the father of the woman he loves? Retroactive evidence indicates that the boss was just playing along in order to sting Dunbar in the act, but the annoying gap between real-life common sense and narrative contrivance remains. In the end, like a TV movie that flirts with originality and finally descends into predictability, Kenney reveals the hidden and smoothes over the disturbing, neglecting his characters for the requirements of his overelaborate double plot.
