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This sequel to the phenomenally successful political thriller, The Odessa File (1972), was cowritten by Forsyth, who died in June of this year, and crime novelist Tony Kent. Forsyth’s former hero, investigative journalist Peter Martin, uncovered the Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen (ODESSA), a malignant brotherhood of former SS officers and Nazi loyalists, and destroyed it. Or did he? This thriller is set in 2025, with Peter’s journalist grandson, Georg, covering a massacre in a sports stadium in Stuttgart. The plot is set in motion somewhat improbably when Georg bumps into an elderly man in the hospital where the wounded have been sent. The man claims to have murdered Georg’s parents; Georg gains access to his files, which contain references to ODESSA. Georg learns from his grandfather, now in his nineties, that ODESSA never really went away and embarks on his own quest to destroy the organization—now Medusa, a world-wide far-right group plotting to eliminate Jews. The plot is often unconvincing but the action is propulsive, and the concept of re-empowered Nazi sympathizers disturbingly real.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In a belated sequel toThe Odessa File (1972), a re-emergent Nazi cult threatens to “finish what Hitler had started,” decades after it was thought to have been eliminated. The person largely responsible for discovering and exposing the fascist ring was the star German journalist Peter Miller. All these years later, his 28-year-old grandson, Georg, a Hamburg reporter and podcaster, learns of the new Odessa (as the group is called) and their plans to upstage the country’s far-right political movement, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The first clue to their existence comes at a hospital following a terrorist attack at a football stadium. A grizzled old man with dementia confuses Georg with his father, Horst Miller, and snarls, “I killed you. You and the Untermensch whore you married.” Horst, a federal cop and intelligence officer, and his wife had supposedly died in a car accident. Posing (badly) as a doctor from the hospital in pursuit of the truth, a shaken Georg visits the ailing man’s family, which results in him being targeted himself. No one believes Georg’s claims about the Odessa except his grandfather, who talks him into importing a psycho killer from England as protection (read: someone who kills bad guys two at a time). Meanwhile, in a poorly developed subplot, Vanessa Price grows increasingly uncomfortable working as a staffer for a right-wing junior senator from Ohio with hopes for higher office. She finds herself surrounded by political operatives responsible for the death of the far better man the senator replaced, who are plotting an illegal government takeover. Suffice it to say that the panic attacks from which Vanessa suffers don’t get any better as the story proceeds. A middling thriller that commits the cardinal sin of using a terrorist attack as a background event, the late Forsyth’s co-write with Kent pales badly in comparison to classics likeThe Day of the Jackal (1971). A so-so plot with so-so characters makes for an uneventful read. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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In this explosive sequel to The Odessa File from Forsyth, who died earlier this year, and Kent (The Shadow Network), journalist Georg Miller travels to a hospital in Stuttgart, Germany, to interview the survivors of a terrorist attack. Georg is following in the footsteps of his grandfather, legendary reporter Peter Miller, who became famous for infiltrating the Odessa, an organization of ex-SS officers who spread across the globe after WWII. At the hospital, Georg meets Carl Ackermann, an elderly dementia patient who mistakes the reporter for his father and confesses to a murder. Stunned, George investigates and soon learns that Ackermann was a central figure within the Odessa. When both Ackermann and his wife die suddenly, Georg is framed for their murders. On the run and fighting to clear his name, Georg teams up with his grandfather, who helps him uncover a deeper conspiracy: the Odessa is now funding terrorist groups to advance their fascist agenda worldwide. Though it revisits a 52-year-old bestseller, this is no creaky nostalgia trip. Propulsive, paranoid, and chillingly plausible, Forsyth’s swan song pivots on a conspiracy that feels less imagined than uncovered. Readers will be rapt. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown UK. (Nov.)