Gregg Keizer, The Longest Night

The Longest Night

Gregg Keizer

Putnam, Aug 2004, $24.95, 384 pp.

ISBN: 0399151702

In 1943 American hit man, Leonard "Mouse" Weiss knows he is fortunate to still be alive as he botched up his last assignment by allowing a witness to survive. Brooklyn Jewish crime boss Meyer Lansky knows that Mouse has been a loyal employee for years, but must make an example to others that failure is unacceptable, but does not want to have his man killed yet, so he cannot have him hang around the town.

Instead, he decides to give Mouse a second chance when Danish Jews contact the mob boss for help. To make a case for world intervention, they need money and weapons to seize a train carrying Dutch Jews to certain deaths. Mouse will make the drop, but the New York thug, who considered absconding with the loot, finds he wants to help the resistance to the atrocities, but also lands in trouble in which failure means the deaths of not just him and the innocents that are involved.

This terse historical thriller is similar to Jeffrey Deaver's Garden of the Beasts with its hitman hero but has its own delicious flavoring being seven years later and outside Germany. Mouse, a terrific antihero turning into the people's champion, mostly tells the tale so that the audience can see his emotions running the gamut including horror of the atrocities. He makes the action-packed story line with his stunned horrific look at the state sponsored terrorism that gripped Europe during WW II.

Harriet Klausner