Night of Broken Souls

Tapping into fears about rising neo-Nazi activity around the world, Monteleone (The Blood of the Lamb) presents a story peppered with harrowing images. It's 1999 when New York psychiatrist Michael Keating notices something odd in his own patients and in reports in the medical literature: people of various races and religions are experiencing horrifyingly vivid past-life memories of dying in Holocaust death camps. Each account shares one detail, of der Klein Engel--The Little Angel--a Jewish capo in the concentration camps who lived for the death and torture of his fellow prisoners. Keating realizes that the Little Angel has been reincarnated, and that the lives of his former victims are in danger again. The book starts off strong, interweaving chilling past-life scenes with present-time reports of mysterious deaths around the world in which tiny, tattooed numbers suddenly appear on the victims' wrists. Monteleone drops interesting characters in and out of the story, however, and Keating proves too introspectively cerebral to be a unifying focus and a satisfying hero. The stories of the prey and their predator keep pace to provide an engaging ride up to a predictable confrontation between good and evil--an ending that barely justifies exploiting the historical reality of the Holocaust for fantasy-driven goosebumps and thrills. (Mar.)