Shot, dumped in the ocean, and left for dead, Ernst Hess, an SS war criminal, awakens in a Bahamian hospital, thinking God has spared him so he could kill more Jews. As Palm Beach law enforcement gets ready to extradite Hess, a suspect in three homicides, he escapes from the hospital, hijacks a yacht, and returns to Florida. In a bar, Hess meets a Holocaust survivor named Max Hoffman, who bears a striking resemblance to him. Hess assumes Max’s identity and picks up where he left off in Voices of the Dead, searching for Joyce Cantor and Harry Levin, and murdering anyone that gets in his way.
Now living in Southern Florida, Cordell Sims has reinvented himself. With the help of a former Motor City neighbor, a gun-runner named High-Step, Cordell gets back into the dope business, selling high-grade weed he buys from a Colombian gang to hipsters and hippies in Fort Lauderdale. Cordell is in his element until the Colombians double cross him, and a frightened Joyce Cantor reenters his life, saying she’d just seen Ernst Hess. Cordell doesn’t believe it, thinking either Joyce has been smoking something herself, or Hess is a zombie.
Harry Levin has fallen in love for the first time since his wife died eighteen years earlier. After spending a couple of weeks together, Colette, Harry’s new girlfriend returns to Munich where she lives. When Colette is kidnapped by Hess‘ Blackshirts a few days later, Harry goes to rescue her, knowing that if the German police find him he’ll be arrested for the murder of three Blackshirts he shot in self defense. Once again accompanied by Cordell, they quietly cross the border into Germany, drive to Munich and take on Hess and his Neo-Nazis.
Peter Leonard’s jaw-dropping Voices of the Dead introduced us to two mortal enemies: Holocaust survivor Harry Levin and Nazi death angel Ernst Hess. Now, their struggle reaches its dramatic conclusion in Back from the Dead.
Bahamas, 1971. Ernst Hess, missing and presumed dead, regains consciousness to find himself stuck in a hospital bed on a strange ward in a foreign country. He must do what he needs to do to get his life back and to finish the job he has been doing for decades.
Harry believes he has already stopped Hess. When he finds out that the war criminal has somehow survived, Harry must do the only thing he can do – kill Hess again – even if it means crossing continents and putting his life and the lives of those that matter to him on the line.
Action-packed and darkly humorous, Back from the Dead is the unforgettable conclusion to a story that launches Peter Leonard into the pantheon of great suspense novelists.
