Tombs of Prussia

It’s November 1991. The Soviet Red Army is bugging out of Poland. Lech Walesa's Solidarity is purging communists from the Polish government. And Lt. Jerzy Bamberg, one-time head banger in the now-disbanded communist secret police, has got one last chance to adjust to the new democratic order. Bamberg's new bosses have busted him down to ordinary cop and assigned him a murder case designed to make him squirm. A Catholic priest he used to persecute has been strangled and set on fire in his parish church near the Polish-German border. The priest had been smuggling gold Russian rubles, part of a Czarist hoard that has mysteriously resurfaced after vanishing in a bloody battle that raged outside the town 250 years earlier. Bamberg delves into the brutal history of a region still haunted by renegade Soviet soldiers, ex-Nazis and foreign treasure hunters. To break the case, he must take an unscrupulous page from his communist days, following clues into the depths of Festung Küstrin, a 400-year-old fortress on the Oder River, scene of World War II carnage. There, the final secrets of this cursed border region are revealed. And maybe rehabilitation lies in store for Bamberg --- and for Poland itself.