A.J. Kazinski

A.J. Kazinski - pseudonym of Anders Rønnow Klarlund (born 1971) and Jacob Weinreich (born 1972), translated from the Danish), (The Last Good Man [hc, Scribner, 2012]) 978-1451640755 [pb, Scribner, 2013] 978-1451640762 [According to Jewish legend, there are thirty-six righteous people alive on earth at any given time — the Lamed Vovniks — and without them, humanity would perish. The catch: the thirty-six do not know that they are the chosen ones.

In Beijing, a monk collapses in his chamber, a fiery mark spreading across his back and down his spine. In Mumbai, a man who served the poor dies suddenly, his body showing the same mark. More deaths follow around the world, and in every case the victims are humanitarians, all bearing the same death mark. An Italian policeman in Venice is the one who first spots that these scattered deaths are connected.

In Copenhagen, it falls to veteran detective Niels Bentzon to investigate. He’s an unusual lead for the genre — a hostage negotiator who is manic-depressive and can’t bring himself to shoot anyone — so when he’s told to find eight “good people” of Denmark and warn them of the threat, he’s skeptical, since he’s trained to see the worst in people, not the best, and starts to realize that not everyone assumed to be good actually is. His skepticism starts to lift once he teams up with Hannah, a brilliant astrophysicist mourning the death of her husband (other summaries describe it as her son) — together they begin to piece the puzzle together and a pattern starts to emerge.

There have been thirty-four deaths, with two more to come if the legend holds true — and based on the pattern, Bentzon and Hannah can predict the time and place of the final two murders, in Venice and Copenhagen. It becomes a race against the clock to stop the killer before the last of the thirty-six are gone. It’s a globe-trotting thriller — taking readers to Africa, China, Venice, Copenhagen and more — but reviewers note it goes deeper than a typical airport thriller, exploring the nature of good and evil and the existence of God, with the plot rooted in Jewish mystical texts. It’s often compared to The Da Vinci Code in structure, though several reviewers consider it the sharper, more grounded book of the two. - Claude]