The prequel to David Downing's best-selling Station series introduces John Russell, an Englishman with a political past who must keep his head down as the Nazis solidify their power.

Berlin, 27 February 1933. A month after Hitler's inauguration as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag parliament building is set ablaze. The Nazis use the torching to justify a campaign of terror against their political opponents.

John Russell's recent separation from his wife threatens his right to reside in Germany and any meaningful relationship with his six-year-old son Paul. He has just secured work as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper, and the crimes which he has to report - the gruesome murder of a rent boy, the hit-and-run death of a professional genealogist, the suspicious disappearance of a Nazi-supporting celebrity fortune-teller - are increasingly entangled in the wider nightmare engulfing Germany.

Each new investigation carries the risk of Russell's falling foul of the authorities, at a time when the rule of law has completely vanished, and the Nazis are running scores of pop-up detention centers, complete with torture chambers, in every corner of Berlin.