The Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil is a thriller by Ira Levin, published in 1976 and filmed two years later. Its plot turns on an old network of former Nazis and on a plan that takes decades to execute.

Yakov Liebermann is a Nazi hunter who runs a centre in Vienna documenting crimes against humanity, kept going by stubbornness rather than money. Interest in tracking down war criminals has faded, and the failure of the bank holding the centre's funds has forced him to move its operations into his own lodgings. In September 1974 he receives a telephone call from a young man in Brazil who says he has just recorded a meeting held by Dr Josef Mengele, the concentration camp doctor known as the Angel of Death. In that recording Mengele is reactivating the old escape network for an assignment that appears to make no sense: ninety-four harmless civil servants, all approaching sixty-five, are to be murdered on dates spread across several years.

Levin builds the suspense out of a conspiracy that becomes more frightening the more logical it turns out to be, and the horror of the book lies in how patiently one man's plan can be laid across decades.