Berlin, 1934
As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympic Games, Jews are excluded from all German sports clubs.
The discovery of two bodies involves detective Bernie Gunther in the lives of two residents of the Adlon Hotel: a beautiful left-wing journalist who tries to promote the idea of boycotting the Olympics from the United States, and a gangster who seeks to use the games to enrich himself and his Chicago Mafia.
Bernie will uncover a huge mechanism operating in the field of construction and finding cheap labor, designed to exploit the huge amounts that the Nazis are ready to spend in order to demonstrate the power of the new Germany.

Winner of the Ellis Peters Award for historical crime fiction