BRANDENBURG

Having cleared up the mystery of Stalin's death (Snow Wolf, 1996), Meade chronicles to chilling effect the rise and fall of a Fourth Reich led by Hitler's long-lost son. Joseph Volkmann, a British Army officer seconded to the Strasbourg-based DSE (the EU's multinational equivalent of the FBI) is tipped off by journalist Erica Kranz that her cousin's murder in Paraguay and the assassination of a right-wing political activist in Berlin may be linked to a smuggling scheme. Assigned to what he assumes is a drug case, Joe checks possible sources in Europe as well as South America. After being subjected to surveillance at every turn of his globe-trotting investigation and stumbling on a series of unsolved homicides throughout Germany, he realizes his brief involves far more than narcotics. Joe's suspicions are confirmed when an Asunci¢n police captain with whom Joe's been working is slain in a shootout with aging fascists in Mexico City. Pressing on, Joe also learns that the contraband he's been tracking is bomb-grade uranium that a band of neo-Nazis plan to use as the centerpiece of a cunningly organized putsch fronted by Karl Schmeltz (the boy Hitler fathered by Geli Raubal and then ordered to Paraguay after her suicide). Deadly serious about their takeover of a Germany made restive by unemployment and the increasing incidence of foreign workers, the latter-day Hitlerites execute the Federal Republic's chancellor and take out the cabinet as well. With time running out and communications impossible, a desperate Joe joins forces with a patriotic terrorist named Wolfgang Lusch to storm a seemingly abandoned monastery on a snowbound mountain outside Munich, where Schmeltz and his co-conspirators have a fully operational missile (with a nuclear warhead) aimed at the heart of Berlin. Another literate and suspenseful thriller from an estimable storyteller who proves that beginner's luck had nothing to do with his impressive debut. (First printing of 125,000; $250,000 ad/promo; author tour)