A deadly tale of ultimate obsession
Stephen Friedman is making a good living in good times. He’s just an ordinary guy.
Or so he thinks.
But one day an extraordinary piece of information tells him differently. It’s a clue from the grave of a Holocaust survivor. A clue that makes him heir to an incredible fortune…a clue that only he and one other man can possibly understand.
That man is Roth Braun, a serial killer who has been waiting for Stephen for thirty years. Roth was stopped once before. This time, nothing will get in his way.
--Obsessed by Ted Dekker, Copyright ©2005 by Ted Dekker, published by WestBow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
My Review
(Although this story was published in 2005, its story line bounces back and forth between 1973 and 1944-1945.)
Rachel Spritzer, a Holocaust survivor, stole a piece of history from her camp’s commandant. She emigrated to the United States, settling in the city of Los Angeles while she searched for the son she birthed and was forced to give up while in the camp. Little did she know that her son, whom she’d named David, lived in the exact same city.
Stephen Friedman had always known he was adopted from a Russian orphanage shortly after the end of World War II. He and his adopted family moved to the United States when he was still very young and Stephen fully embraced his new American home and lifestyle. He’s thirty now, a real estate investor with no clue that his life was about to be turned upside down because of Rachel Spritzer’s death.
Discovering that Rachel may have been his mother sends Stephen on a voyage of discovery about his past, a past he had no idea about, and a quest for his future, where he becomes obsessed about finding a biblical treasure, and the woman destined to be his other half.
But Stephen is not the only one on the hunt for the biblical treasure. Roth Braun is the son of the commandant from whom Rachel stole the treasure and he will do anything…anything…to reclaim the lost piece of his father’s spoils of war.
Rachel Spritzer, a Holocaust survivor, stole a piece of history from her camp’s commandant. She emigrated to the United States, settling in the city of Los Angeles while she searched for the son she birthed and was forced to give up while in the camp. Little did she know that her son, whom she’d named David, lived in the exact same city.
Stephen Friedman had always known he was adopted from a Russian orphanage shortly after the end of World War II. He and his adopted family moved to the United States when he was still very young and Stephen fully embraced his new American home and lifestyle. He’s thirty now, a real estate investor with no clue that his life was about to be turned upside down because of Rachel Spritzer’s death.
Discovering that Rachel may have been his mother sends Stephen on a voyage of discovery about his past, a past he had no idea about, and a quest for his future, where he becomes obsessed about finding a biblical treasure, and the woman destined to be his other half.
But Stephen is not the only one on the hunt for the biblical treasure. Roth Braun is the son of the commandant from whom Rachel stole the treasure and he will do anything…anything…to reclaim the lost piece of his father’s spoils of war.
While intriguing, this story does not contain the frenetic intensity that I’ve come to associate with a Ted Dekker story. Too much of the story is spent on Stephen’s preoccupation with gaining access into Rachel Spritzer’s apartment building to search for the clues to the treasure and not enough on Stephen finding out about his heritage. Forgive me, I’m the daughter of a genealogist and I would find the hunt for the past to be more interesting than spending nearly half of a 382 page book trying to gain access to a building. The vignettes into the past, describing Rachel’s life in the concentration camp were well done and added depth to the story, and I found myself enjoying those more than the “present day” scenes.
If you have an interest in the Holocaust and biblical treasures, you might enjoy this story.
I give this story TWO STARS.
