Customer Reviews

Herrenrasse

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This is fiction in a true life mystery setting that is scary; Vietnamese immigrants oppressed and murdered by modern Nazis. The action starts in Chapter 1 and continues throughout with an exciting and suspensful ending. The story flows and the book, once started, is hard to put down.

This book seems so real that whenever I go through Denver, I look sideways at all those normal people and wonder. You can't but like the FBI agent T.K. MacNaughton -- for the first time in a thriller, the FBI agent isn't some hard-a creep pushing his weight around. This character has a heart and it gets broken. But for all the horror, this is a story of hope. Do we have to keep killing our kids? Do we have to keep killing our future? All for ideologies that twist into hatred. Incredible book!

Despite Amazon.com saying it is out of print, Herrenrasse is indeed available (Spies in Deo Publ. at $22.50, Montrose, CO 81401-8713). The book begins with a nightmare and ends with hope. It is based on actual skinhead and extremist activities in the Denver metro area in the late 1980s and early 1990's: "slamming," murder of traitors, murder of innocents just because they are in the path of hate-filled people. The author's association with extremists and anti-government groups, as well as government agents, makes this novel more than real. The center of the story isn't the murder, kidnapping and tagedies, but the courage of the people who face them. A great book!

In Denver in 1989 the murder of a young Vietnamese girl begins a campaign of terror against the Vietnamese community and the wealthy psychiatrist who sponsors them. The pain is real. Th violence is real. HERRENRASSE, by J. Malcolm Martin, explodes into a gripping nightmare from the opening page. This mystery-thriller (Spes in Deo Publications, 351 pp, $22.50 HB) pits FBI Agent T.K. McNaughton against a shadowy extremist group calling itself "Herrenrasse" (the German word means "Master Race"). HERRENRASSE is a spiritual journey for the reluctant McNaughton. When he is first dragged into what appears to be a cut-and-dried civil rights case, the agent considers skinheads little more than amusing. He dismisses them as the "lunatic fringe". Yet when he plunges into the screaming, bleeding brotherhood of hate, he finds his faith in the Bureau and in God shaken. The novel is eerily prophetic, reflecting actual events that occurred AFTER publication. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center says of this book, "The line between fiction and fact is all too real in Martin's thriller... a must read for anyone concerned with the rise of hate crimes..." Edward Straight also endorsed the novel, writing in his 1994 review, "both major and minor characters are painted with a feeling of sinew and soul. Long after reading HERRENRASSE, one wants to know how these people are, what they are doing now. McNaughton, both cynical and tender, and Chim, the courageous Vietnamese woman who won't let him give up, are memorable individuals. But Tuan Tu, who is hope in the face of hate, perhaps leaves the longest impression." The murder of the first Vietnamese child seems to be a random hate crime, attributed to the growing skinhead population in the metro area. Yet, when a psychiatrist who sponsors Vietnamese immigrants is kidnapped, Agent McNaughton begins to think the rash of hate crimes is the work of a group much more insidious and organized than skinheads, a group that is using the skinheads. McNaughton finds hatred calls itself Herrenrasse, Master Race. This Herrenrasse seems to be invisible, run by dead men. No FBI informants know where to find it. The Herrenrasse executes traitors. They kidnap. They torture men to "reclaim" their minds. They put bullets through the brains of small children. McNaughton begins to suffocate beneath the frustration and fear that the Herrenrasse can't be stopped, beneath the terror that they are doing something inhuman to those they abduct. How can he stop them when they have no faces, when they are ordinary Americans in the crowd? Or will he be forced to wait for them to deliver what is left of their victims? HERRENRASSE has a heart-wrenching finale in the mountains of western Colorado and the kind of surprise ending that leaves one pondering how much hate we are willing to overlook in our friends, our family, or even ourselves. This dramatic novel would make a great flick, its conclusion forever haunting the heart.