By Henry A. Covey "Cogitate Editing"

Haunted by mother-in-law Irene Lederer's unsettling true story of an Allied aerial mission that flew over Auschwitz in August of 1944 on its way to bomb the I.G. Farben synthetic oil and rubber plant less than five miles away, Lawrence Kaplan set out to find answers to a nagging question: Why didn't Allies bomb the camp's gas chambers or railways when they had the chance? House of Ghosts is the result of this inquiry, an historically bent hardboiled thriller based off the premise that one of those pilots had the gumption to stop the slaughter.

When we first meet ex-cop Joe Henderson with all his personal demons in tow, there is some question as to whether or not this beer-guzzling pill-popping grizzly bear of a curmudgeon has the supreme guts to take on neighbor Preston Swedge's whole houseful of WWII ghosts, but Henderson is quick to charm as the plot jumps into step and speedily embarks on an entertaining crusade for truth that culminates in a revelatory ending.

Kaplan has done his homework, too. House of Ghosts is, at the same time, an illuminating inquiry into less frequently discussed events of WWII and the Holocaust, one that raises questions about the geopolitics of a modern-day world that more than half a century later still bears idle witness to feverish acts of genocide backed by aggressive dictatorships.