A few years ago, back in the summer of 2000, when I was supposed to be taking it easy and recuperating from a bullet that almost blew my damn leg off (yeah, that’s another story), my bastard neighbor Preston Swedge is found very dead in his house across the street. “Dead” is putting it mildly. He’d been sitting deceased in his kitchen chair for a couple of weeks in August in Westfield, New Jersey before the Morgue guys got there—he’d turned into a friggin’ science experiment!

Being a jerk, I couldn’t leave this alone. When the vultures finally had the estate sale, I scooped up a suitcase of old documents from World War Two. You know, The Good War. Wasn’t such a good war if you were a Jew and part of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ at places like Auschwitz.

Point being, even a crippled retired cop sometimes is good for something besides farting in the tub. Curiosity killed the cat. And it almost got me killed (again!). Those old papers led to a Jew named Rothstein. And you know what? There really are good guys in this world. I forget that, being in the cop business I never met many white hats. But this Rothstein turns out to have been one of those guys who change history, even if no one knows their name.

Rothstein was a US bomber pilot, who actually tried to put Auschwitz out of business. He would’ve changed history. But some bastard stopped him. And it wasn’t Hitler.

No, turns out old Preston Swedge was a bastard long before I ever met him.

Anyway, I’m not a writer. My dentist, Larry Kaplan, is the guy who wrote the book. You can learn more about him if you got the stomach for it. Kaplan’s the guy who wrote the story about how I connected that maggot farm Swedge to Auschwitz and Paul Rothstein, the hero that no one knows.

Meantime, some guy wrote about this book, The House Of Ghosts, on that Amazon web site. He said,

“If you love detective stories, this is the book for you. "House Of Ghosts" is where Raymond Chandler meets Herman Wouk's "Winds of War."

Yeah, Detective Joe Henderson may be a new character to you, but he's the modern incarnation of Philip Marlowe. Hard-boiled, hard drinking, hard loving, cynical and offering wry observations of life in the age of Gap and Starbucks.

Author Larry Kaplan takes the reader on a masterful dance between the present day, and the darkest hours of World War II as his detective protagonist, Joe Henderson, experiences personal redemption while seeking to bring justice and closure to the heroic actions of Paul Rothstein who defied Allied authorities in his attempt to bomb Auschwitz from his B-17 Flying Fortress.

Epic in its breadth, the novel sweeps you effortlessly from contemporary Westfield, New Jersey to the Princeton University of 1939, and on to the aerial battle above Italy and Poland in 1944. Along the way you'll meet up with notables such as Charles Lindbergh, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and General Fulgencio Batista of Cuba. Not to mention Alenia Gilbert, the exotic dancer who helps to make this the hottest summer on record.

To me, this book is summed up as "booze, broads, and a Jew named Rothstein."

To me this book is a damn pain in the ass. I wish that Jerk named Kaplan would just leave an old cop to rest in peace.