"It is difficult to sift truth from fiction in this gripping story."
Adam is working as a military lawyer in 1946 in the ruins of a German city still devastated by wartime bombing. In defiance of army regulations, he falls for a brave and delightful young girl. Rose has been forced to work in a brothel in her wealthy family's former town house. Adam, though damaged by his battle experiences, offers her the possibility of escape to a better life.
In the attic of Adam's lodgings lives an old Austrian doctor tormented by the shocking revelations he has to make about Hitler's harsh childhood and his later career in the trenches of the Somme. What was Hitler's first murderous act? Who was the aristocratic English beauty who stole his heart, and with what consequences?
Finally, in the dramatic setting of the tunnels beneath the forbidden zone of The Dead City which still carries the stink of corruption and death, Adam and Rose are cornered by a desperate escaped war criminal. Who will unexpectedly rescue them from their terrible ordeal?
The story begins and ends in the present day in the peaceful setting of the Cotswolds. But it becomes clear that the long and sinister shadow of Hitler can reach even here.
"I feel I have to come to know the characters so well, Pinkie, Fritz, and Leonie too, and felt every jolt along the bomb blasted road.
I don't want to leave them."
"Exciting, sensitive, and funny by turns."
"Loved the Shakespeare references and the literary allusions."
"I cried, but I laughed as well."
"Vivid and sympathetic descriptions of a shattered city."
- ISBN10 199931560X
- ISBN13 9781999315603
- Publish Date 12 November 2018 (first published 8 September 2017)
- Publish Status Active
- Imprint Mitford Oak Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 354
- Language English