Product Description

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.

Known worldwide for page-turning, adrenaline-laced thrillers, Dekker raises the stakes in this story of passion, revenge, and an all-consuming obsession for the ultimate treasure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23837 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 496 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781595543110
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Dekker's (Red, etc.) novel begins intriguingly, flashing back and forth between the 1940s story of two pregnant concentration camp inmates tormented by an evil commandant and the 1970s story of the unfinished business their children resolve. While the characters, especially the group of women in the concentration camp, are initially compelling, their development is subsumed by a tedious plot. Only one scene offers real suspense and horror. Surrounding that compelling moment—when the two young inmates make a desperate choice under appalling circumstances—is an uneven novel with an excessive fascination with its villains' sadism and several abrupt and unseemly changes in tone. The most enduring and wearying contrivance is the extended treatment of Nazism as a quasi-religion, elevated to a homespun form of Satanism by the commandant, Gerhard Braun, and his equally evil son, Roth. The ever-changing rules of this religion are used as a poor and convoluted rationale to explain why Gerhard and Roth let the women and their children live for 30 years, despite countless opportunities to kill them. Dekker adds a treasure hunt element to the plot and a certain amount of slapstick, which feels inappropriate in conjunction with nightmarish scenes from the Holocaust.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Hamburg, Germany
July 17, 1973
Tuesday Morning

ROTH BRAUN SLOWLY TWISTED THE DOORKNOB AND GAVE THE door a slight shove. A familiar medicinal odor stung his nostrils. Outside, the sun warmed a midsummer day, but here in the dungeon below the house, the old man lived in perpetual twilight.

Roth imagined a Jew stepping into a delicing shower and let himself relish the horror he might feel in that moment of realizing that more than lice were meant to die in this chamber.

Roth was in a very good mood.

The smothering quiet was broken by the sound of the old prune's tarred, seventy-eight-year-old lungs rasping for relief. Gerhard's wheezing annoyed Roth, ruining his otherwise perfect mood.

The only living soul he despised more than the Jew who'd stolen his power was Gerhard, who had allowed the Jew to steal his power.

He glanced at Klaus, the gangly male nurse who had tended his father for three years. The white-smocked man hovered over Gerhard in the corner of the room, refusing to meet Roth's eyes. Gerhard Braun sat in a dark-red leather recliner, blue eyes glaring over the nasal cannula protruding from each nostril.

"Good morning, Father," Roth said. He closed the door quietly and stepped into the room, pushing aside a curtain of tinkling glass beads that separated it from the entryway. "You wanted to see me?"

His father looked at a servant, who busied himself over the table in the adjacent dining room.

"Leave us."

By the trembling in his voice, either Gerhard really was dying, or something was upsetting him, which invariably sowed its own sort of death. How many men alive today had been responsible for as many deaths as his father? They could be counted on two hands.

Even so, Roth hated him.

The servant dipped his head and exited through a side door. The steel door closed and the nurse flinched. Glass in a cabinet behind the table rattled despite the room's solid-concrete walls. The nineteenth-century Russian crystal--one of dozens of similar collections pilfered during the war--had once belonged to the czar. The Nazis' defeat should have sent Gerhard to the gallows; instead, the war had left his father with obscene wealth. The paintings alone had netted him a significant fortune, and these he owned legally. He'd shipped them to Zurich, where a hotly contested law made them his after remaining unclaimed for five years. Compliments of the Swiss Federation of Art Dealers.

Until the day I suck the energy from your bones, I will love you for showing me the way.
Until the day I suck the energy from your bones, I will despise you for what you did.

Gerhard held up a newspaper. "Have you read this?"

Roth walked across the circular rope rug that covered the black cement slab and stopped five feet from Gerhard. A hawk nose curved over his father's thin, trembling lips. Wispy strands of gray hair backlit by a yellow lamp hovered over his scalp. Skeletal, blue-veined fingers clutched what appeared to be a Los Angeles Times. A stack of newspapers--the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, London's Daily Telegraph, and a dozen others-- sat a half-meter thick on the small end table to his left. Gerhard routinely
spent six hours each day reading.

Gerhard flung the paper with a flick of his wrist, never removing his eyes from Roth. It landed on the floor with a smack.

"Read it."

The male nurse pretended to fiddle with the oxygen tank. Roth stood still. This attitude of Gerhard's was no longer simply ruining his mood, but destroying it altogether.

"I said, 'Read it'!"

Roth calmly bent and picked up the paper. The Los Angeles Times was folded around an article in the Life section, "Fortune Goes to Museum." Roth scanned the text. A wealthy woman, a Jew named Rachel Spritzer, sixty-two years of age, had died three days ago in Los Angeles. She'd been survived by no one and had donated her entire estate to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

"So another Jew's dead." Roth lowered the paper. "Your legacy lives on."

His father clutched the arms of his chair. "Read the rest."

His chest sounded like a whistle. If Roth wasn't a master of his own impulses, he might have done something stupid, such as kill the man. Instead, he set the paper on the windowsill and turned away. "You've read it, Father. Tell me what it says. I have a ten o'clock engagement."

"Cancel it."

Roth walked to the bar. Control. "Just tell me what has you so concerned."

"The Stones of David have me concerned."

Roth blinked. He poured a splash of cognac into a snifter.

"I'm finished chasing your ghosts." He swirled the brandy slowly before sipping it. "If the Stones still exist, we would have found them long ago."

Gerhard managed to stand, trembling from head to foot, red as a rooster around the neck.

"They have been found. And you know what that means."

He launched into a coughing fit. Roth's pulse quickened a hair and then eased. If the man wasn't dying, he was losing his mind. Surely the Stones hadn't been found after all this time.

Gerhard staggered three steps to the windowsill, pushing his startled nurse out of the way, and grabbed the newspaper. He leaned on the wall with one hand and held the paper up in the other. He threw the paper toward Roth. It fluttered noisily and landed on the black slab.

"Read it!" Gerhard's eyes drilled him. So then maybe there was something to this.

Roth picked up the paper, found the article, and slowly read down the column. What if Gerhard was right? What if the relics did exist after all? They would be priceless. But the Stones' monetary value didn't interest Gerhard--he already had enough wealth to waste in his final years.

Gerhard's obsession was for the journal that had gone missing with the Stones.

And Roth's obsession was for the power that had gone missing with the Jew who'd taken the journal.

He had spent nearly thirty years tracking down innumerable leads, searching in vain. There was no telling how much wealth had been stripped from the Jews when Hitler had gathered them up and sent them to the camps. Much of the fortune had been confiscated by the gestapo and recovered after the war, but a number of particularly valuable items-- priceless relics that belonged in museums or in vaults--had disappeared. Some of those treasures could be found in this very house. But any wellheeled collector knew that the most valuable collection had vanished for good in 1945.

The Stones of David.

One stunning item in Spritzer's collection is an extremely old golden medallion, better known as one of the five Stones of David. According to legend, the medallions are the actual stones selected by David to kill the giant Goliath. The smooth stones were subsequently gilded and stamped with the Star of David. The collection was last verified in 1307, when they were held by the Knights Templars. The collection was rumored to be held by a wealthy Jewish collector before World War II but went missing before the claim could be verified.

Alone, each medallion may be worth over $10,000,000. But the collection in its entirety is valued at roughly $100,000,000. The relic will be displayed in a museum yet to be disclosed with the following cryptic caption at Rachel Spritzer's request: "The Stones are like the lost orphans. They will eventually find each other."

Sweat cooled Roth's palms. He set the paper on the bar, set an unsteady finger in its margin, and scanned to the end.

Rachel Spritzer lived alone in an apartment complex she owned on La Brea Avenue and died a widow. The complex will be sold by the estate, along with much of Spritzer's noncollectible property.

Rudy and Rachel Spritzer immigrated to the United States sixteen years ago, five years before Rudy was killed in an automobile accident. (See B4.)

For a moment Roth's vision clouded. His mouth went dry

."Now I have your attention?" Gerhard demanded.

Roth read the article again, searching for any phrase that might undermine the possibility that this Jew could be anyone other than whom Gerhard was suggesting.

"She was sixty-two," Gerhard said. "The right age."

Roth's mind flashed back to those war years when he was only twelve. Even if the connections were only circumstantial, he could hardly ignore them.

"I knew the Jew survived," Gerhard said.

"She donated only one Stone. There were five."

"If one Stone exists, then the journal exists. Someone has that journal!"

"She's dead."

"You will make her speak from the grave." Gerhard swayed on his feet, right fist trembling. His eyes looked black in the basement's shadows."She knew. She knew about the journal."

"She's dead!" Roth snapped. He took a deep breath, irritated with himself for losing control. The fact was, Gerhard's history with the Stones gave him knowledge that no one else could possibly have.

"You know well enough that the journal implicates the entire line of elders. It lists each of our names and the names of the women we killed. It must be found!"

Mention of the women triggered a coppery taste in the back of Roth's mouth. The last time he'd seen the journal, it ...

Customer Reviews

Obsessed
How far would someone go to satisfy their all-consuming obsession for the ultimate treasure? In Ted Dekker's novel 'Obsessed' we meet Stephen Friedman and Roth Braun who are about to find out. Stephen is a wealthy Jewish immigrant who came to America from an orphanage in Russia. Having searched to years with no success, he has come to believe the mother he never knew is lost forever. Roth, the son of a Nazi Commandant, is determined to finish what his father started decades ago in a Nazi labor camp, no matter what the cost.

The adventure begins when an article in a newspaper convinces Stephen that he is the son of Rachel Spritzer, who had recently died, leaving behind one of the very valuable Stones of David, believed to be one of the five Stones chosen by David to kill the giant Goliath. Obsessed with finding the rest of the Stones, Stephen will go to any lengths to secure the treasure and discover his past. To complicate matters, Roth has also learned of the Stones and is able to buy Rachel Spritzer's house before Stephen is able to. Convinced that clues to what they seek are hidden in her house, both men are working feverishly to find them before the other can.

I would highly recommend Obsessed as a great read. As those who have read his books before would already know, Ted Dekker writes a novel that keeps you at the edge of your seat the whole time. The pages are filled with twists as unexpected as always, action, adventure, mystery, and a bit of romance. If you enjoy this is book, I'd also suggest Blink, Thr3e, and his Circle Trilogy.

A well-told story
I'm a big fan of Ted Dekker's books, with "Three" remaining one of my top five all time favorites for the payoff alone. With "Obsessed", we have an uneven but well-told story. The elevating tension felt in Three is not here, settling instead for a slow-burn rise the first few chapters that settles into simmering for the remaining portion of the book. The focus of the book is on the obsession of two characters for the same thing. Halfway through the book, the obsession of one changes, then the other does too, effectively destroying the need of the first half of the story.

In all honesty, this isn't Ted's best book. The characters here make truly strange decisions that make no sense given the way they are portrayed to us. Their obsessions become fanatical far too quickly to be believed. The ending of the story doesn't really have a payoff like his previous books, ending with a sigh rather than a bang. Still a good read, but not on par with his previous thrillers.

As a Christian, I can not recommend this book
I just finished Dekker's Obsession this morning, and then finished reading the reviews on Amazon for the book. I am shocked that there is only one other person out of now 84 reviews that sees what I see in this book. Dekker's portrayal of the evil of the Braun's is in itself evil. I have read most of Dekker's books, but this one is over-the-top. To a person that enjoys modern horror movies or to a person that has not had any hardcore experience with spiritual warfare, his tales of the bloodletting and hangings are just sick/gross/gorey. To someone who has been in the trenches, his delivery of the satanic mindset/philosophy is what is truly scary. This is done with no mention of salvation beyond talk about an old messianc Jew. To my way of thinking, if I am going to read a supposedly Christian book that goes to that detailed level of truly satanic thought (which I hope I do not do again), I surely want to read about the only weapon that we have against such forces and that is our salvation in Jesus Christ. Don't get me wrong, I have read Peretti's great Darkness books as well as several other's that deal with spiritual warfare, and as such am not shy with the topic. I really wonder what is going on with Ted to write this book. Your typical secular writer I believe would not go to that level of evil in his writing. I would like to think that your typical Christian writer would not go there either because it is spiritually unhealthy to go down that road. To the non-Christian or weak Christain, this book can plant some really sick stuff in their heads. The following is a clip from the only other Amazon review that feels the ways that I do:

"Of greater concern was the darkness of the evil in this story. It is one thing to portray an evil person, but when these characters are involved in satanic rituals, draining blood from their victims and drinking it, it seems that a line has been crossed, even if the deeds are portrayed with a minimum of detail. At some point should we not need to heed the apostle's warning to "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret" (Ephesians 5:11,12)? At what point do we cease to even speak of the deeds done in darkness? I cannot say, but I do know that the sheer depravity of the deeds in this book made me uncomfortable, and I'm no prude. I thought back to when I used to read thrillers of this type and realized that many good authors have been able to develop "bad guys" without resorting to such evil deeds."

My $.02 for what it is worth. As always, Dekker's writing style is great, but he surely was in a bad place when he wrote this one. I'll pray for him. Incidentally, I finished that book about 3 hour ago, so my thoughts are obviously quite fresh.