It is winter of 1945, seven months after the Nazis’ defeat, and Munich is in ruins; disease, starvation and winter’s icy embrace have replaced the bullets and bombs. Yet deadly crime does persist, and it’s the job of Criminal Investigator Mason Collins, former Chicago police detective, U.S. soldier, and prisoner-of-war, to enforce the law in the American Zone of Occupation. Blackballed from every big-city police department in the U.S. for violating the Blue Code of Silence, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is Mason’s last hope for doing what he loves most: being a homicide detective. But then a new kind of murderer emerges, ritually torturing and butchering his victims, and Mason faces the most dangerous and challenging case of his life.
When a mutilated body is found in an abandoned factory and arranged in a gruesome display, Mason takes the case. But tracking this elusive criminal, who seems to choose his victims at random, yields precious few leads, and in a vast city of rubble and countless thousands of easy prey, Mason can only rely on his wit and gut instincts. But at each turn the killer eludes his pursuer, and Mason must go places he never could have imagined: from interrogation rooms with unrepentant Nazi war criminals to penetrating the US Army’s own black market. And before Mason knows it, the murderer has made him a target. Now it’s a high-stakes duel, and to win it Mason must bring into deadly play all that he values: his friend and partner, his future as a police detective, his newfound love – even his life.
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