Best-seller Picoult takes on a heavy subject in her latest outing: the Holocaust. At 25, Sage Singer is scarred, both physically and mentally, by the car accident that took her mother's life. A baker who works at night in a New Hampshire shop run by a former nun, Sage shuns almost all human contact, save for her coworkers and her funeral-director boyfriend, Adam, who is married to another woman. Sage ventures out of her comfort zone to befriend Josef Weber, an elderly retired teacher, who throws her world into chaos when he tells her that he's a former SS officer and asks her to help him end his life. Sage, whose grandmother Minka survived the Holocaust, reaches out to the Department of Justice and is connected with Leo Stein, a charismatic attorney and Nazi hunter. Leo travels to New Hampshire to investigate Sage's claims, which leads them to Minka, who shares a surprising connection to Josef. Based on extensive research, this is a powerful and riveting, sometimes gut-wrenching, read, in which the always compelling Picoult brings a fresh perspective to an oft-explored topic. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Picoult will tour widely with this bold moral inquiry, connecting with book clubs and making television, radio, and online appearances.

A baker enlists a Nazi hunter to entrap a nonagenarian who may have brutalized her grandmother in Picoult's ambitious latest. Sage, who works in a bakery attached to a New Hampshire retreat center, prefers the overnight hours bakers keep. Her face is scarred (from a trauma not immediately revealed), and she is mourning her mother's recent death. Having abandoned her Jewish faith, Sage is estranged from her two sisters, but she is still close to her grandmother, Minka, a Holocaust survivor. Josef, a much respected 95-year-old retired German teacher, confesses to Sage that he is a former SS officer, real name Reiner, who once was an Auschwitz guard. Sage calls in Leo, a Washington, D.C.–based FBI agent who specializes in tracking down Nazi fugitives. Leo asks her to elicit Minka's story, never before told, in hopes of finding an eyewitness to Josef's atrocities. Reiner's and Minka's wartime experiences form the bulk of the novel. Reiner, a bully recruited early by the Hitler Youth and later by the SS, is soon inured to slaughter by presiding over mass killings of Jews in Poland. Later assigned to Auschwitz along with his (comparatively speaking) gentler and more sensitive brother Franz, Reiner distinguishes himself as a particularly brutal overseer of the women's camp. Franz, meanwhile, keeps his hands relatively blood-free by supervising the camp's accounting office. Minka's story takes her from an idyllic childhood as a baker's daughter to the misery of the Polish ghetto and imprisonment in Auschwitz. Readers will see the final twist coming far in advance due to unwieldy plot contrivances which only serve to emphasize what they are intended to conceal. Still, a fictional testament as horrifying as it is suspenseful.