The Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin

Amazon says:  In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele's nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project - the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed . . . Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin's most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible. Praise for Ira Levin: 'Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King 

A brief plot summary:

As well as being a successful playwright, screenwriter and composer, Ira Levin has written several bestselling and well-known novels including these classic thrillers: Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, as well as The Boys from Brazil. All these books have been made into equally successful films.  

Published in 1976, The Boys from Brazil opens with the outline of a compelling plot: six men are instructed by a white-suited, evil kingpin to kill 94 men across the world on certain dates, all of whom are civil servants around the age of 65. It seems a strange target demographic, but then we discover that the operation's guiding hand belongs to Dr Josef Mengele, the German SS officer and physician who earned the epithet "Angel of Death" from his gruesome medical experiments in Auschwitz.

Yakov Liebermann, an elderly Jewish Nazi-hunter (Mengele's nemesis who is a conflation of Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Serge Klarsfield, who attempted to capture Mengele in South America) uncovers the plot at an embryonic stage. He proves to be an unthreatening – but very tenacious – protagonist, whose patience and brainpower finally unravels the horrific and insane reason for the murders.

In some ways the book is now fairly dated - it was first published in 1976 - and at the time of publication the inclusion of real or near-real characters must have added a chilling dimension. What scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering: in the 1970s, although scientifically possible, Mengele's plan belonged firmly in the realm of fiction; now it's not nearly so far-fetched.

Ira Levin's narrative is a compelling page-turner and makes chilling and disquieting reading in the light of genetic advances and also in the context of political upheavals and machinations in the current day.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_%28novel%29