Max Bader

During the Great Depression, after a critically-acclaimed debut concert, the 16-year-old piano prodigy, Max Bader, leaves New York City and hitchhikes into the South, searching for the father he’s never met, and encounters racism and forbidden love.

This second novel in the Max Bader series finds Max and friends in New York accidentally drawn into the investigation of heroin trafficking, child prostitution, and murder in a corrupt Manhattan Police Department, an indifferent Catholic Church, and a university hospital complicit in the crimes. Confronted with overwhelming odds and with few people they can trust, dare they seek justice?

After escaping the sanitarium, Father Bruno begins a terrifying odyssey to discover why Jews are leaving Germany. He finds the answer in the unspeakable cruelty of Hitler’s empire.

The novel explores the healing of deep scars left by physical and emotional abuse, intertwining themes of revenge, redemption, and the complexities of human choices set against the backdrop of World War II. Central to the story are characters grappling with their dark past, including SS Colonel Wilhelm Geisler, a man haunted by severe childhood trauma and the evil of malignant retribution growing inside him, and Father Sigmund Klemper, a priest who risked everything to save Jews during the Holocaust, but chooses now to befriend the most evil Nazi he’s ever met.