Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis

In this gripping debut memoir, former FBI agent Payne details how he took down members of the Base, a white supremacist group, in 2020. Payne grew up in South Carolina and joined the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office in 1993, when he was 22. He was swiftly promoted from patrol to the narcotics squad, where he became a star investigator before joining the Bureau in 1998. In 2016, Payne joined the Joint Terrorism Task Force and started targeting domestic terror groups. After his bosses learned about the Base, Payne was assigned to infiltrate it, and joined the group’s military-style training program as a new recruit. Eventually, he came to regard the group’s scheme to ignite an all-out race war through vandalism, propaganda, and terrorist attacks as “the most dangerous and overlooked threat facing us today.” His work paid off with the arrests of multiple group members on conspiracy charges. Payne nimbly juggles a pulse-pounding account of his undercover efforts with a poignant glimpse at the toll his work took on his wife and young daughter. Fans of Joseph Pistone’s Donnie Brasco should snap this up. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (Mar.)