The Good Assassin: How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia

Today's nonfiction post is on The Good Assassin: How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia by Stephan Talty. It is 304 pages long and is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The cover is red on top with the title and on the bottom half a ripped photo of Herbert Cukurs. There is foul language, sex, rape, and violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice—a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.
Before World War II, Herbert Cukurs was a famous figure in his small Latvian city, the “Charles Lindbergh of his country.” But by 1945, he was the Butcher of Latvia, a man who murdered some thirty thousand Latvian Jews. Somehow, he dodged the Nuremberg trials, fleeing to South America after war’s end.
By 1965, as a statute of limitations on all Nazi war crimes threatened to expire, Germany sought to welcome previous concentration camp commanders, pogrom leaders, and executioners, as citizens. The global pursuit of Nazi criminals escalated to beat the looming deadline, and Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency, joined the cause. Yaakov Meidad, the brilliant Mossad agent who had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann three years earlier, led the mission to assassinate Cukurs in a desperate bid to block the amnesty. In a thrilling undercover operation unrivaled by even the most ambitious spy novels, Meidad traveled to Brazil in an elaborate disguise, befriended Cukurs and earned his trust, while negotiations over the Nazi pardon neared a boiling point.
The Good Assassin uncovers this little-known chapter of Holocaust history and the pulse-pounding undercover operation that brought Cukurs to justice.

Review- This is a very interesting book about a small part of the greater story of World War II. This book is divided in two parts; the first part is during the war and what happened in Latvia, and the second part is about finding Cukurs and assassinating him. Both parts are interesting and both are necessary to understand the drives of the men involved with Mossad. The story is very intense with the hunt for Cukurs, the spy craft, and the fight to the death. There is also politics in the background that made this mission all the more important for the families of the Jews that Cukurs murdered. Talty handles this story with care and respect but he spares no details, so if you are more sensitive to war crimes, then have caution with this book. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.