Ruthless ex-Stasi private eye takes on Vatican corruption to avenge her lover's death.
Lenya Fischer is the private eye equivalent of a pirate. She was in Stasi in the Eighties and never unlearned their ruthless ways.
Now she's 63 and hired to dig up dirt on Peter Brunner's Austrian lumber company Brunner Group. The client is his jealous cousin Ilsa.
Lenya needs her lover Orell Schneider's network since opaque Liechtenstein foundations own Brunner Group and hide its blackest secrets. Orell used to head up Liechtenstein's financial intelligence unit and did the same for Vatican City until he fled the Pope's trumped up charges against him. She brings him in, a car bomb kills him, and she comes home to find her house trashed and her cat hanging from a noose of piano wire. Everything is connected.
Now it's only justice for Orell or death as Lenya chases drug and gun money into Brunner Group, the Vatican Bank, and the pockets of a corrupt European establishment cornered like rats by the millions of protestors filling the streets. Globalization's upperworld criminals may just have picked the wrong fräulein to fool with.
"Nichols’s geopolitical thriller moves at breakneck speed, as nimble and relentless as protagonist Lenya Fischer, a tenacious Stasi agent turned private investigator…
Drawing on his intelligence career, Nichols’s debut has a lived-in authenticity, and he challenges readers to keep track of its sprawling conspiracy…
Nichols deftly explores the relationship between religion and political power, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the rise of transnational networks that operate above the law.
Takeaway: Fast-paced global thriller tackles entrenched villainy with righteous indignation."
- Publisher's Weekly BookLife
