Customer Reviews

Last Nazi

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Stan Pottinger's book kept me turning pages, kept me guessing, kept me up at night, and kept me desperately hoping that what happens in the book can not and will not happen in real life.

What makes it so good is that is yes, this book has a stunning plot that twists and turns, and yes, it has a stunning female heroine and a stunning fiend at the helm, but more importantly:

All too often suspense or thrillers have only one premise - good vs evil -- THE LAST NAZI has that too, of course -- but it has more. This threat is not just to society at large but is played out on a very personal scale with the main characters so that you - the reader - feel it and respond to it in a far more immediate way.

Nothing about this book is a disappointment. And everything about it sheer excitement from the very first page to the last.

Note to the author: This book demands a sequal. And I can't wait.

Just when we thought all fears of Nazi terrors had long been laid to rest "Adalwolf" appears in our country. His given name is not known. What is known is that he is a genius, and was once the diabolic young protege of the Butcher of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele. The world believed him dead for almost half a century. Yet, he is very much alive and has killed three people.

Melissa Gale is an attorney and investigator for the Office of special Investigations, the entity known as "Nazi Hunters." She is on the trail of "Adalwolf," little knowing that he is stalking her. It is only through Melissa and her personal medical history that this deadly psychopath can create a virus capable of mass destruction.

The two readers cast for this epic thriller deserve a hearty high five. Paul Hecht invests his delivery with appropriate menace, and Maggi-Meg Reed is a sterling Melissa.

- Gail Cooke

"The Last Nazi" features Melissa Gale, a beautiful and brainy lawyer and Nazi hunter. Gale is desperately trying to track down a villain named Adalwolf, who assisted the infamous Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. Adalwolf is now a seventy-five year old man, but he has not slowed down either physically or mentally. The unrepentant Nazi is an expert in biology, genetics, and virology, and he hopes to use his formidable knowledge to create a virus that will destroy his enemies.

The first half of "The Last Nazi" is intriguing, suspenseful, and full of surprises. Together with a SWAT team, Melissa closes in on a rooming house in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Adalwolf supposedly lives. Will Melissa's desperate effort to capture Adalwolf finally succeed? Or has her cunning adversary once again outsmarted her?

The beginning of the novel has thrills, chills, and many surprises. Unfortunately, the second half of the book goes downhill, as the author substitutes formulaic melodrama for genuine suspense. Stan Pottinger's many twists, turns, and complications dilute his story's effectiveness. If the author had expended more effort on humanizing his characters and on making his plot a bit more realistic, "The Last Nazi" would have had far greater impact.

Many thriller readers like myself have wondered if there would ever be a variation on the traditional Neo-Nazi plot. "The Last Nazi" by Stan Pottinger breaks the mold with its diabolic originality. A tenacious Nazi hunter, attorney Melissa Gale is tirelessly pursuing the malevolent protege of Dr Josef Mengle, Adelwolfe who has escaped justice for decades. Her unquenchable drive leads her down many corridors of treachery, distrust and mocking red herrings. Adelwolfe taunts her through electronic voice recordings and eerie music and coincidentally a mutant strain of virus is asserting itself in almost epidemic proportions. Melissa's personal life is further complicated by her desire to conceive as her biological clock is ticking.Yet her path and Adelwolfe's will intersect in startling and unexpected ways that will mesmerize and delight readers who seek the unpredicatable in thriller fiction. Any further revelation of the plot would cheat the readers out of a pulsating discovery for themselves. "The Last Nazi" peaks at the top of its class and Stan Pottinger has cemented an already prestigous reputation with this superior excursion into dizzying excitement.

I could not put this book down! I took it on a long flight and read the whole thing straight through. Enjoyed the characters, the twists and turns, the suspense, the thrills...everything! This is my first book by Stan Pottinger, and I will definitely be reading his others.

Meliss Gale is a Nazi Hunter. The last Nazi who Gale is hunting is the mysterious and elusive Adalwolf. Adalwolf is rumored to be the foster son of The Third Reich's Dr. Josef Mengele, last seen polluting the waters of Chile with his dying breaths. Gale has come close to capturing Adalwolf on numerous occasions, and as THE LAST NAZI opens, she thinks she has him. Remember, however, this is the beginning of the book, not the end.

Adalwolf and Gale have been doing a deadly dance for years, and Gale has thought she has had him on numerous occasions, only to have him slip from her grasp. Adalwolf, for his part, has decided that it will be only fitting to utilize Gale as his unwilling, unwitting instrument by which Hitler's goal of the total extermination of the Jewish race will be accomplished. Adalwolf's plan is horrifically ingenious, and has the added effect of raising a moral dilemma. By the time you finish the final page of THE LAST NAZI you will be mentally out of breath, yet wishing that this fine novel had another 300 pages to go.

The result is a thriller that ratchets the suspense level up with each rapidly turning page, while simultaneously creating a heartwarming effect that provides an element of hope and beauty in the face of irrational hatred. Pottinger with THE LAST NAZI continues his rapid rise up the 'A' List of thriller writers with this unforgettable, "impossible to put down" novel.

This is a sensational thriller which is even more terrifying when you realise the basic plot could be so easily developed one day by terrorists or other evil people in the real world. Adalwolf worked at Auschwitz, he was a brilliant young evil medical protégé experimenting on children and pregnant women who managed to escape when the Russians arrived. In 2002 he is at the top of the Justice department's Nazi hunt list and Melissa Gale is determined to capture him. She also teaches ethics to trainees and doesn't believe in torture or the death penalty no matter what the benefit to others.

She soon realised that the chase has become deadly personal, and that she must stop him before he gets her and her unborn baby. He has developed a virus that only attacks Jewish genes and can spread throughout the entire world' population in 45 days. He needs a carrier and Melissa's unborn child will do just fine.

This novel starts of extremely fast and to be honest the paces dies down for a while and a bit of editing may have improved the book in the middle parts, but once you get to the final third section the pace heightens to a spine chilling fast read, which you will not be able to put down until the final page.

Melissa is a "nazi hunter", working with the FBI to track down the last nazi criminal who goes by the name Adalwolf. Her grandmother and long time friend Ben Ben-Zevi were once prisoners in the death camps, so she has many personal feelings about her job. Adalwolf, however, is very aware of Melissa, and loves to play games with her. His latest game getting her suspended from her job so that he can continue working on releasing the NTX virus he has developed that will target only people with Jewish heritage.
She and her husband David have been trying for years to have a baby, and after her suspension move to Florida to be near Ben-Zevi, who has found a doctor named Eric Brandt who believes he has found a way for Melissa to become pregnant.
Though she is suspended, she continues to work with her cohert Harris in attempting to track down Adalwolf, and when her leads get hotter and hotter, so does Adalwolf's determination to keep her away long enough for him to perfect his ultimate biological weapon.
This is a great book, but it is thinner and weaker than Pottinger's first two novels. "The Fourth Procedure" and "A Slow Burning" were meatier, heavy, intense main courses; while "The Last Nazi" is more of a quick light snack. It is still a good book, more in the fast go-for-the-gusto style of Stephen J. Cannell rather than typical Pottinger, but if you are going to the beach or taking a flight somewhere, pick this up and pass the time pleasently.

Though he is a foster son, sixteen years old Adalwolf behaves like a chip off the old block, emulating the worst traits of his mentor research scientist Dr. Josef Mengele. He calms down the young victims undergoing inhuman experiments. When the Nazis lose, everyone assumes that Adalwolf died in the final days.

Almost six decades later, agents of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations accompany a SWAT team trying to capture the evil but brilliant Adalwolf. Among the squad of "Nazi Hunters is attorney Melissa Gale, who has hunted the butcher for several years while having trying to have a baby with her journalist husband. However, she is soon going to learn how diabolical her foe is as he has developed a virus that will wipe out the entire global Jewish population with Melissa as his carrier.

This is a taut thriller that may turn out to be the year's best with its brilliantly developed story line that cleverly spins into an incredible moral dilemma. From the beginning to the end Adalwolf proves to be one of the more infamous villains in a long time. His final solution is frightening yet seems plausible because the creation of designer viruses is a potential by-product of the genome mapping. Fans who read THE LAST NAZI will not make this the last Stanley Pottinger novel they ever read as he raises the thriller bar to unbelievable heights.

Harriet Klausner

Ok, maybe I would enjoy this book more if I was reading the printed version instead of listening to awful accents and terrible 'acting' but this is really pretty terrible. All the 'twists and turns' are incredibly predictable. Instead of making the readers feel suspense over who is the villain, we are told outright. And we are told everything that the villain is thinking and doing. As if I couldn't figure out already that the witness to a crime was phony, the author goes ahead and confirms it, almost with a damn drum-roll as if we should be incredibly impressed with how clever he was. I suppose the only real suspense comes from wondering if the heroine will figure out in time to save herself, her baby, and her remaining friends. Oh no!! <cue corny acting> Seriously, don't waste your money.