I’m not sure a novel about the sufferings of the Warsaw Ghetto should be this much fun, but Lisa Barr sure knows how to put together a high-stakes revenge thriller. The revenge belongs to aged Hollywood idol Lena Browning, who was once Bina Blonski, a young Jewish actress in Warsaw whose phenomenal acting skills and Aryan looks served her in resistance, escape, self-reinvention—and more. At the novel’s opening, Lena is finally set to reveal her dark memories to an equally strong-willed young star, Sienna Hayes, who’s determined to play Lena in a blockbuster movie about her life. Sienna wants to write and direct the movie, star as Lena and win an Oscar. But Lena has bigger plans even than that.

Barr, the author of the bestselling Woman on Fire and other novels, sets up a masterful plot-within-a-plot, then throws escalating surprises like a series of fireworks. She salts the over-the-top plot twists with real historical detail; even the valiant and doomed historians of the Oyneg Shabbos group, who buried the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto in milk cans so that the truth would outlive them, make an appearance. (That story has been catnip to novelists, understandably so, since the resurfaced archives were catalogued and publicized in 2009; Lauren Grodstein’s We Must Not Think of Ourselves late last year was a more serious treatment of the material, though it still managed to add some suspense, not easy when we know the historical outcome.) Don’t read The Goddess of Warsaw for serious themes, though; read it for high drama, great movie effects and Nazi villains so evil and twisted that they are almost (dare I say it) funny.