[The Guilt Merchants is set in El Pueblo], a South American town of no size or importance…. But if El Pueblo is uninteresting, some of its citizenry are most interesting, particularly Carlos Anido. He is a Jewish survivor of Weisering, one of the worst of the Nazi concentration camps. Anido seems almost a Job-like figure. His present is not much happier than his past….

The mystery about Anido is the locked room he rents near the center of town, which no one else has ever been inside, but from which voices have been heard speaking German.

To El Pueblo comes Sidnitz, an Israeli agent who for sixteen years has been searching for Wilhelm Brullach, the murderous commandant of Weisering, though he does not know what the man looks like or even if he is still alive. The action of this novel … begins with the arrival of Sidnitz. The...