A Thousand Devils

Max Heller’s second case

“This was the price of survival. He would pay for it with his dreams and his deepest, most unfathomable fears.”

A freezing winter, an occupied city, abandoned children, a brutal murderer on the loose—and Max Heller’s second case

Dresden, 1947: the city lies within the Soviet occupation zone and is still a desert of rubble and ruins. All through that bone-chilling winter, life is dominated by housing shortage, hunger and disease. Detective inspector Max Heller is summoned to the scene of a crime in Dresden Neustadt by the newly-instigated People’s Police. The victim seems to be a Red Army soldier. But before he gets a chance to begin his investigations he discovers that the Russian military has removed the corpse from the scene. All that remains is a frozen pool of blood and an abandoned rucksack. When Heller opens it, he makes a gruesome discovery: a man’s severed head…