NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic.”—O, The Oprah Magazine • The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the tower, the last stand—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered

In this auspicious literary crime debut, an inexperienced homicide detective struggles amid the lawlessness of a post–World War II Eastern European city.

It's August, 1948, three years after the Russians "liberated" this small nation from German occupation. But the Red Army still patrols the capital's rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories. Twenty-two-year-old Detective Emil Brod, an eager young

In this classic novel, James A. Michener brings his grand epic tradition to bear on the four-hundred-year saga of America's Eastern Shore, from its Native American roots to the modern age. In the early 1600s, young Edmund Steed is desperate to escape religious persecution in England. After joining Captain John Smith on a harrowing journey across the Atlantic, Steed makes a life for himself in the New World, establishing a remarkable dynasty that

Olen Steinhauer's first two novels, The Bridge of Sighs and The Confession, launched an acclaimed literary crime series set in post–World War II Eastern Europe. Now he takes his dynamic cast of characters into the shadowy political climate of the 1960s. State Security Officer Brano Sev's job is to do what his superiors ask, no matter what—even if that means leaving his post to work the assembly line in a factory, fitting electrical

Eastern Europe, 1956 — Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar, a proletariat writer as well as a state militia homicide detective, is a man on the brink. Estranged from his wife, whom he believes is cheating on him with one of his colleagues, and frustrated by writer's block, Ferenc's attention is focused on his job. But his job is growing increasingly political, something that makes him profoundly uncomfortable.

When Ferenc is asked