Taking real-life Kriminalpolizei and SS officer Georg Heuser and the events of his life as inspiration for his novel, David Thomas (Blood Relative) tells a chilling story of how a human can devolve from fine, upstanding citizen to heartless killing machine.
Georg Heuser is a young man with strong ambition when he joins the German Criminal Police. He intends to do his job superbly and rise in the ranks accordingly. The first case he investigates--and helps solve--is a high-profile serial murderer. In grotesque irony, Heuser's superiors reward him with a promotion to SS-First Lieutenant and a transfer to Minsk, where his job is to murder helpless Jews as part of the Nazi's "Final Solution."
Though the account is fictionalized, Ostland is no less emotionally challenging than a traditional history. Thomas carefully examines the life of this respectable individual and the forces that enable his transformation to mass murderer. Without exempting Heuser from personal responsibility, Thomas questions the level of his guilt and provokes his readers to do the same.
Ostland alternates between sections told in Heuser's voice during World War II and sections told from the perspective of a pair of criminal trial lawyers 20 years later. The latter include little of the actual legal proceedings and introduce a superfluous affair that temporarily draws focus away from the power of Heuser's story. Despite the slight deviation, Thomas has created a captivating narrative with a high level of suspense and a morally charged theme. This is a horror story told with grace and passion. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts