The Autocrat is the story of Jenny Harriman, a 10th-grade teacher who inherits her uncle's estate after he dies. She discovers that he was not the person she knew while growing up and decides to find out his real identity. 

One of the featured characters is her son-in-law, Stephen, a Secret Service agent tasked with protecting the First Lady of the US. Another one is Stephen’s childhood friend Ron Classon, an NSA operative who uses the weight of his office to look into corruption. 

The Autocrat follows the early life and education of the First Lady at the Sorbonne in Paris to a meeting with a Russian GRU agent who arranges a chance meeting for her with the future President of the USA. Two years later, Steven Landrieu Jenny’s son in law overhears the First Lady speaking Russian, and his suspicions are raised. 

In the meantime, Jenny Harriman, while investigating her uncle’s true identity, discovers that he was in fact a German Jew who was imprisoned by Hitler in a concentration camp called Buchenwald. He survived by using his vivid imagination to daydream about restoring his father’s old cars, something that he and his Dad loved to do. 

For four years, he survived the harsh brutality of Buchenwald, and after he was released in 1945, he came to America and vowed he would spend the rest of his life bringing the criminals who had murdered his family to justice. 

Many Nazi soldiers were arrested after WW2 and prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials, but some escaped justice and fled to Brazil and beyond. Many of them managed to slip into the United States using forged documents. The Autocrat tracks one such war criminal, a Nazi who worked at Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, overseeing Jews and murdering many of them for fun. 

This man managed to enter the USA on forged papers and through a series of deft moves founded a company in Detroit where he lived and worked in anonymity for 17 years until he was recognized by one of his employees. 

Will he eventually be brought to justice?