In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, historians Adrian Coombe and Tulpe Vellum are cruising down the Rhine in search of medieval artefacts for their university. Eccentric Carolingian Judge von Metzenburg persuades them to take him immediately to the Black Forest Frankenrichter Courthouse in exchange for valuable antiques. In the village of Ewigkeit, Adrian and Tulpe find a converted monastery, a sixteenth-century coaching inn, and the railway station-but no village and no villagers. Before they learn the terrible wartime fate of Ewigkeit Village, undercover detective Horst Thielmann, suspecting fraud by the judges, enlists Adrian and Tulpe in his investigation. A Cold War communist plot to destroy the West German economy tests Thielmann to the full. Tulpe, desperate to cross the Rhine to the Alsace in France in search of her lost mother, discovers in the home village of Vellum an extended, splintered family torn apart by their affiliation either to Germany or to France. This pales into insignificance when she discovers the truth about what happened to her mother when she went to Vellum years previously and disappeared. By the same author: A King among Pawns The Price of Enlightenment Helvetia, the Voyage of 100 Days Voices from the Cosmos Natavallia in the Maldives Albatross I: Tumbril in the Sky Albatross II: Autodestruction Last Train to Polmouth The Water Mill The Zeppelin Girl