Historical Thriller

A month has passed since the stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Though Hitler insists Germany is winning the war, commanders on the ground know better. Now word has reached Berlin of a Red massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. For once, both the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Goebbels want the same thing: irrefutable evidence of this Russian atrocity. Both parties agree that the ensuing investigation must be overseen by a professional trained in sifting evidence and interrogating witnesses. That man is Bernie Gunther.

Leo Demidov is no longer a member of Moscow's secret police. But when his wife and daughters are invited on a "Peace Tour" to New York, he is immediately suspicious. Forbidden to travel, Leo watches helplessly as his family is pulled into a web of conspiracy and betrayal that will end in tragedy.

A late-night tip leads crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon to a crime scene where a young woman lies dead, a Jewish prayer book in her purse. Disturbed by the bizarre circumstances, Gordon is determined to unravel the mystery of her demise, especially after her shocking identity is revealed.

It is August 1944 and Paris is on the cusp of liberation. As the soldiers of the Third Reich flee the Allied advance, they ravage the country, stealing countless pieces of art. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring will stop at nothing to claim the most valuable one of all, the Mona Lisa, as a post-war bargaining chip to get him to South America.

In 1943, a British spy plane crashes in Nazi France, leaving the passenger “Verity” to be captured by the Gestapo and her best friend, Maddie, behind. When Verity’s captors tell her to confess or be executed, she writes her confession page by page --- uncovering her past, how she became friends with Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wreck, desperately hoping to make it home.

Occupied Breslau, 1933: Two women are found murdered on a train with scorpions writhing on their bodies and an indecipherable note in an apparently oriental language nearby. Police Inspector Eberhard Mock is called to investigate, but uncovering the truth in Breslau is no straightforward matter. The city is in the grip of the Gestapo, and the mysterious note seems to indicate a ritual killing with roots in the Crusades.

Jimmy Nessheim, a young Special Agent in the fledgling FBI, is assigned to infiltrate a new German–American organization known as the Bund. Ardently pro-Nazi, the Bund is conspiring to sabotage American efforts against Adolf Hitler. But as Nessheim’s investigation takes him into the very heart of the Bund, it becomes increasingly clear that something far more sinister is at work, something that seems to lead directly to the White House.

During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, cynical British journalist Richard Denham and American Olympic hopeful Eleanor Emerson are determined to report the brutality behind the carefully staged imagery of the Third Reich. They soon become entangled in a treacherous game involving the Gestapo and the British Secret Intelligence Service. At stake: a mysterious dossier that threatens to destroy the leadership of the Third Reich.

Mark Mills follows AMAGANSETT, THE SAVAGE GARDEN and THE INFORMATION OFFICER with HOUSE OF THE HUNTED, a story of betrayal, love, and the inescapable pull of the past as an ex-spy finds himself drawn back into his treacherous former life.

American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into the shadowy country of Istanbul, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs for the Allied war effort. Now as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of post-war life, he is given one more assignment, a routine job that goes fatally wrong, plunging him into a tangle of intrigue and moral confusion.

Set against a dazzling backdrop of Prohibition-era American cities ranging from Jazz Age Boston to Tampa's Latin Quarter, Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a Boston Police captain, defies his orthodox upbringing to journey up the dizzying ladder of organized crime.

In the summer of 1938, Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he’s coming; for their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris.

Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London 43 years earlier. The blueprint for the killings seems to be De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives.

September 1941: Reinhard Heydrich is hosting a gathering to celebrate his appointment as Reichsprotector of Czechoslovakia. He has chosen his guests with care. All are high-ranking Party members, and each is a suspect in a crime as yet to be committed: the murder of Heydrich himself. Indeed, a murder does occur, but the victim is a young adjutant on Heydrich’s staff.

Army cop Erik Rider is enjoying his war until he’s sent to disrupt Vietcong opium fields in a remote Highland province.

London, summer of 1584: Radical philosopher, ex-monk, and spy Giordano Bruno suspects he is being followed by an old enemy. He is shocked to discover that his pursuer is in fact Sophia Underhill, a young woman with whom he was once in love.

In THE BARBED CROWN, the sixth tale of rogue and adventurer Ethan Gage by William Dietrich, our hero returns to Paris and London. Against a background of imperial pomp and the gathering clouds of war, Gage plots revenge on Napoleon Bonaparte for the kidnap of his son.

In 1662, Jakob Kuisl, the hangman in a small village, got a letter from his sister asking him to come to the imperial city of Regensburg. When he arrives, he finds her throat has been slit and he is the prime suspect.  Can his daughter, Magdalena, and her friends uncover the plot behind the false accusation?

With her best friend murdered and her boyfriend Max, the main suspect, gone, Nora can barely manage to keep afloat. All she knows is that the entire nightmare is related to the ancient book translation they had been working on for a school project. Then she receives a coded message from Max begging her to join him in Prague. They have a chance to clear his name and finally solve a 400-year-old mystery --- which includes instructions on building a machine to talk to God.