![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Reiner, a bully recruited early by the Hitler Youth and later by the SS, is soon inured to slaughter by presiding over mass killings of Jews in Poland. Reiner’s and Minka’s wartime experiences form the bulk of the novel. Leo asks her to elicit Minka’s story, never before told, in hopes of finding an eyewitness to Josef’s atrocities. Sage calls in Leo, a Washington, D.C.–based FBI agent who specializes in tracking down Nazi fugitives. Josef, a much respected 95-year-old retired German teacher, confesses to Sage that he is a former SS officer, real name Reiner, who once was an Auschwitz guard. Having abandoned her Jewish faith, Sage is estranged from her two sisters, but she is still close to her grandmother, Minka, a Holocaust survivor. Her face is scarred (from a trauma not immediately revealed), and she is mourning her mother’s recent death. Sage, who works in a bakery attached to a New Hampshire retreat center, prefers the overnight hours bakers keep. A baker enlists a Nazi hunter to entrap a nonagenarian who may have brutalized her grandmother in Picoult’s ambitious latest. ![]()
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