The Name of the King

The Name of the King is the story of a small group of powerful totalitarians who exercise immense control over America's people, culture, government and institutions; a cabal, if you will, that lusts for even more. Among them is Albert Holley, of the National Reserve, which controls the nation's money. There is also Horst Kruger, a concentration camp killer hiding in plain sight from Nazi hunters by pretending to be David Polyakov, a Jewish doctor and an inmate of Auschwitz, whom Kruger killed in Switzerland at World War II's end for the purpose. The cabal has committed the greatest swindle in history-the theft of the nation's gold reserves-a crime so artful that the victims, the American people and government, don't even know they have been taken. Only two men unwittingly stand between the conspirators and total victory: tall, blond, insufferably handsome bank robber Spats Davis, who has never known his father, and who discovers the theft in the course of the biggest bank heist in history, and short, balding, innocuous Abe Goldstein, who works for the Department of Sanitation, City of New York.
Abe has it made. No more risk of strangulated hernia carting garbage cans to the truck. Now he is the driver, entrusted with tons of trash and dangerous equipment. A grateful city has even named him Garbage Man of the Year-twice, yet! Sure, Shirley is trying to give him a heart attack, but she means nothing personal. She has to give her husband a heart attack. She's Jewish. The Bible ordains it. "Thou shalt give thy husband a heart attack." Yes, Abe has it made . . . until the voice; the voice that refuses to let him sleep until he risks rabbinical damnation and admits he is Jesus Christ. And why is the world's most revered Jewish philanthropist-in reality a Nazi war criminal at the top of Simon Wiesenthal's list and maybe, just maybe, Abe's father-trying to kill him? Who is his father, anyway? Could the answer lie in the hand of the perfectly preserved arm the Swiss avalanche reveals buried in the snow? And why would Abe's mother kill the lover who has sought her in desperation for forty years?
The story begins in New York in 1978. It moves to Nazi Germany, in the early thirties, when Hitler was consolidating his power, and where Kruger is becoming a Nazi doctor, helping to define Hitler's "racial policy." It moves to Auschwitz, to Switzerland, and then back to New York forty years later, where, for different reasons, both Spats and Sidney H. Bloberg, Revenue Agent for the Internal Revenue Service, infiltrate a group known as the "Jesus Jerks," sought by the police.
Tragic, yet egregiously funny, The Name of the King proves, like the recent Academy Award movie "Life Is Beautiful," that, because of the irrepressibility of human nature, humor can erupt in the most unexpected places. It builds to a shattering climax in a duel to the death at the torch of the Statue of Liberty.