Book 12 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year!

With everything going on in the world lately, I needed to read something cathartic, and when I was at the bookstore David Agranoff’s 2023 horror novel The Last Night to Kill Nazis caught my eye!

It is the last day of the European war. Hitler has shot himself in his bunker. Soon, word will spread and Germany will surrender. But some of the surviving German leadership has a plan to escape the country and start anew in a distant land. They are congregating at Hitler’s mountaintop aerie to await planes to fly them to safety that evening.

Some of the Allies are aware of these plans, however, and haunted by the horrors of the concentration camps, they refuse to let these nazis escape — or even go on trial. These Allies have a secret weapon — an ancient monster from the Carpathian Mountains that hates the nazis just as much as they do. If they can get this monster to the German hideout, the nazis will face supernatural vengeance beyond their darkest imaginations.

This novel is quite a fast read, and I finished it in about a day of casual reading. It starts somewhat unexpected in Hitler’s bunker itself, as we experience those final moments from the perspective of the tyrant and his most loyal servants. We end up following some of those servants throughout the book as they make their way to their mountaintop aerie, in parallel with the Allied agents who are transporting their deadly cargo to the same destination.

It is not particularly a surprise that the ancient evil that the Allies have found is a vampire, and the novel itself plays out somewhat as a mixture of a classic vampire story and a war story like The Guns of Navarone. (One of the characters in the book is even named Mallory, just like a character in ‘Guns.) More than just a war story, however, Last Night serves as an exploration of the nature of evil. Every character in the book has been affected and twisted by the war. The nazis, of course, are fanatics due to their hateful ideology. Noah Sammovich, an OSS agent and also Jewish, is obsessed with thoughts of vengeance for the horrors perpetrated on his people. The vampire is driven by his curse — and by his hatred of those who would willingly be monsters. One member of the team is motivated by revenge on the creature for killing her father, a would-be van Helsing.

The book is very fast-paced, and quite satisfying. Even though the broad outcome of the events of the Last Night are pretty much pre-ordained, there are a lot of questions and uncertainty in the specifics of the plan that kept me reading throughout. The book is an unconventional horror story and espionage thriller, and I had a great time reading it.