The Last Man [Mass Market Paperback]

Charles Kenney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 26, 2002

A gripping story about 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.

Gerta Wahljak is haunted by a photograph of ten Nazi officers taken in the concentration camp where she was imprisoned during the Holocaust. For decades, she has traced the fates of all these men except one. Until now. While Gerta waits in a 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. Now Keegan, a man also haunted by his past, must decide whether to risk his career to help the parents of the woman he loves. . . .

Editorial Reviews

From 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 Globe and 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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Kenney, author of the critically acclaimed Son of John Devlin (1998), examines the stranglehold of the past upon the present in this moving suspense story. An elderly Polish woman, a death-camp survivor now living in Boston, looks across the cardiac care unit at Mass General and sees a figure from her past, an aged but still recognizable Nazi officer. She has held his image close to her over the years, in a photo of 10 Nazi officials taken at the camp. He is the last surviving man from that photo. The U.S. attorney's office investigation delivers shock after shock, both to the elderly woman's family (her son discovers that his girlfriend is the Nazi's daughter) and to the Nazi officer's family as well (everyone discovers that the Nazi is married to a woman active in the National Jewish Council). The rush to judgment is tempered by doubts about the Nazi's role in the death camp, and the story is complicated by the tension between the desire for vengeance and the need for mercy. Spellbinding. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (November 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 034544180X
• ISBN-13: 978-0345441805
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,694,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Really good book...., July 4, 2004

By 

Christopher Berry (Hale, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Man (Mass Market Paperback)

This is the first book I have read in this kind of genre...something different from what I usually read...anyway, I found this story to be very heartwarming and I found myself to actually care about the characters in the book. If you are looking for something that is different from the usual "thriller", pick up this book, this is one that you may learn something from....

4.0 out of 5 stars A Thoughtful and Moving story, August 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Man (Hardcover)

This book touches on many themes, but most forcefully delivers a story about forgiveness that brought tears to my eyes.
The Nazi who loved a Jew, and did everything imaginable to save her from a concentration camp; the abandoned and emotionally abused boy who did everything imaginable to discover the hidden truth of his mother's death; and that same boy's own heroism in forgiving his father's responsibility for the mother's death. The same theme resonates in the resolution of revelations that come from the discovery of the truth of his lover's family's past and their involvement with the Nazi Reich.
The tension I felt between abhoring the Nazi in hiding, and then being moved by discovering his heroism was what really made this book for me. It is so hard, as a Jew, to look beyond the general pure hatred that word Nazi brings forth. It is hard to forgive any of them, despite what we know about their situation. My own grandfather was murdered in a Camp and yet, I found it satisfying to find a character that I could sympathize with despite his allegiances. And the main character in this book was very appealing too.

This book, although it brought tears to my eyes, made me feel good as well, because it gave me hope that there is the possibility of acceptance and closure from even the most atrocious circumstances.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reading, August 27, 2001

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Last Man (Hardcover)

This is the first review I have written but this is one of the best books I have ever read. It combines history with fiction beautifully. Anyone interested in learning more about the horrible Nazi death camps will find this book fascinating