Books like Ostland by Thomas, David

Based on a horrifying true story of one of the Holocaust's worst Nazi war criminals comes a crime thriller that combines a police procedural, courtroom thriller, and a fast-paced war-time narrative. In Ostland David Thomas confronts the question of how does one man charged with eradicating evil become one of its greatest perpetrator. In wartime Berlin the brilliant, idealistic young detective Georg Heuser joins the Murder Squad in the midst of the biggest manhunt the city has ever seen. A serial killer is slaughtering women on S-Bahn trains and leaving their battered bodies by the tracks. Heuser must confront evil eye-to-eye as he helps track down the murderer. Soon after, Heuser is promoted by the SS and sent off to oversee the systematic murder of thousands of Jews in the new empire the Nazis call Ostland. Years after the end of the war Heuser thinks his diabolical past has been forgotten. Yet, an enterprising young lawyer, Paula Siebert, searching through Soviet archives, discovers Heuser and his fellow officers' crimes. Siebert is haunted by one question: how could a once decent man have become a sadistic monster? Desparate to cover his tracks, Heuser uses his training as a lawyer and years as a police detective to distance himself from his co-conspirators and escape justice. Ostland is a gripping detective thriller, a harrowing account of the Holocaust and a thought-provoking examination of the human capacity for evil.

First publish date: 2015