Pain Killers

Manny Rupert is a former police officer who has hit bottom and still struggles with addiction. He takes an undercover job to determine whether a man held in a California prison is really Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the Angel of Death. The question is whether this figure, whose crimes at Auschwitz still provoke horror, faked his own death thirty years ago.

Manny's inquiry drags him into a conspiracy that touches on genocide, narcotics, eugenics, and human experimentation, and exposes America's hidden history of cooperating with the Nazis. The story lurches between extremes, moving through a world that feels perilously close to catastrophe.

This is a graphic and unsettling novel, best suited to readers with strong stomachs. Jerry Stahl pushes into a strange, inventive, and frighteningly plausible setting, with unusual sexual content, brutal violence, and humor that is as sharp as it is loud.