Bøger af J T Conroe

The Butcher's Palace is a suspense novel set in contemporary Russia. An American art expert travels by train to Karapol in Asiatic Russia to authenticate a lost Jan Vermeer masterpiece reputedly in the possession of the ruthless and dictatorial president of one of the Russian Federation's remote autonomous republics. On the train, he meets a beautiful Russian woman with an agenda of her own with whom he begins a love affair. Arriving in Karapol, he and his new lover are introduced to the ambitious president of the republic who is a great admirer of Stalin, who is disgusted with the current state of Russia, and who has plans to secede from the Federation and lead all of Russia back to greatness. The American soon finds himself at the center of a murderous three-way intrigue for which he is ill-prepared.

A troubled childhood with a tempestuous mother, and the life-long search for the identity of his father complicate the career of a free-lance investigative reporter, and impose upon him an almost desperate need to provide his own wife and children with a normal family life. When he is recruited to be a speech writer for a charismatic presidential candidate, he finds himself caught between two political conspiracies, both of which require his personal destruction.

Adrian Dietrich is a prominent member of a Nazi Fourth Reich group in Germany called the Circle. During the war, he was the commander of one of Heinrich Himmler's special SS units that were assigned the task of looting Europe on a scale never before seen. Now, as a successful Berlin art and antiques dealer, he helps to finance the Circle's operations through the black market sale of those remaining artworks which the Allied occupation forces were unable to find. The middleman for these illicit dealings is his trusted American son-in-law.There is one hidden cache of stolen masterpieces, however, that only Dietrich (and a woman to whom he is bound by the secret of his criminal acts while in the SS) knows about. The problem is that he has been unable to get at it for decades as it lies buried in Dresden behind the Iron Curtain. Then the Soviet empire falls apart and now he must retrieve it in secret before others learn of its existence, especially the German authorities or the other members of the Circle. He is an old man now, so the task falls to his trusted son-in-law. The only impediment, it seems, is a scrupulous young architect -- also, not by coincidence, an American.