Black Sun Rising by Otho Eskin; Westport, Connecticut: Meridian Editions; ©2025; ISBN 9781959-170235; 278 pages; $15.95.
SAN DIEGO – In this thriller featuring detective Marco Zorn, Zyklon C, a faster acting poison gas than the Holocaust-era Zyklon B, was developed too late to be deployed by the German Nazis at the end of World War II. But American Neo-Nazis have unearthed large cylinders of the toxic substance and plan to assassinate the President-elect on Inauguration Day in a mass casualty event.
Zorn is assigned by his superiors at the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police to go undercover and, if possible, to thwart the plans of the mysterious leader of the American neo-Nazi movement, who goes by the pseudonym of Black Sun.
Without knowing whom he is up against and whom he can trust, Zorn sets about establishing a new identity as a rogue policeman who has murdered his partner and another cop.
The intrigue reaches all the way up to the Vice President-elect, a retired general under whom Zorn was once almost court-martialed.
Jews are calumnied with the familiar right-wing rhetoric in this fast-moving novel, but otherwise are bystanders in this fight between good and evil.
*
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.