In 1979 San Francisco, it’s spring. Jimmy Carter is president. Russia will invade Afghanistan in December, and Iran takes US Embassy staff hostage. Stagflation and inflation run rampant, and tyro private investigator Colleen Hayes bemoans paying $20 to fill her gas-guzzling Ford Torino’s tank: “85 cents a gallon --- up more than 20 cents since last year.”

A few months ago, Hayes returned from Ecuador having rescued daughter Pamela from a tyrannical cult leader (2021’s BAD SCENE). Pam is a month from giving birth, making Colleen “a first-time grandmother under forty.” Make that 36, without the expletive she calls cop-friend Matt as they surf a post-coital wave on the waterbed.

"Those who can stomach the atrocities depicted in Max Tomlinson’s challenging and impressive novel will find international intrigue, thriller, mystery and a satisfying read."

That’s not the only wave Hayes rides. Ingrid Richter, a Swiss bank senior executive in town for a conference, pays a generous sum for the unlicensed PI to off-record locate her nephew Erich, who never came to collect an annual stipend. Hayes illicitly finds in Erich’s sordid no-star hotel room a Nazi ID card and other war-era artifacts. Moreover, Erich recently arrived from Argentina, where an ex-Nazi was knifed. Now, a woman with a faded numeric forearm tattoo suffers the same fate on a Muni train.

Does Richter want to find Erich only to give money to someone who rents a dive? When the PI provides Richter info as to Erich’s whereabouts, Richter jets to Rome, where the nephew went the day Hayes got paid. Puzzle pieces don’t fit, and Hayes persuades contacts at SFPD to foot the bill for a few days in Italy.

A parallel plot involves two political inmates at the Sachsenhausen “rehabilitation” camp in 1942. A Polish prisoner-guard has earned the moniker suka z Sachsenhausen, feared even by the Nazis. The other from Berlin is 17 and learned from her father that for salvation one must save another person: in this case, six-year-old Jakob Rosenstein. Both women survive: one by brutality, the other by cunning and wit. Colleen Hayes identifies with one, as she spent a decade in prison for murdering her husband, who had sexually assaulted his own daughter. She saved herself by saving Pam from the doomsday cult in Ecuador.

Reading about the Holocaust horrors is disturbing for some, and it regurgitated harsh memories from my educational tours of Auschwitz and Cambodia’s Killing Fields. Those who can stomach the atrocities depicted in Max Tomlinson’s challenging and impressive novel will find international intrigue, thriller, mystery and a satisfying read.