A young, battle-scarred American soldier encounters a beautiful and troubled German girl on the crazy-mean streets of 1972 Cold War Europe."A powerful book in which grimness and lyricism fight to a draw." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) When Air Force sergeant Christopher Adams finds himself the lone survivor after his forward observation post is overrun by enemy forces in Vietnam, he realizes he only wants to go somewhere he might quietly and peacefully mend his young, torn body and shattered mind. Instead, the fateful-as-they-are-ironic hands of the military drop him onto the world stage of continents facing off in Cold War. Here, in the heartland of Germany, and a mere twenty-five or so years after Hitler and the Nazis brought those same continents to near ruin, Chris now finds himself surrounded by a world in chaos and flux, protest and terror, and shivering in the imminent shadow of nuclear Armageddon. A world in which there is little quiet, and even less peace.

But then, as journeys of fate and irony are wont to do, he meets her-Nikolina von Lotzenburg, a.k.a. Nikki Lotz, a beautiful, fiercely independent, enormously evasive, seventeen-year-old top photographic model who escaped from East Germany when she was six, and who-now surrounded by those, including her equally fierce mother, Rami, that would try and control every fiber of her high-profile and higher-stakes existence-may be even a more damaged soul than himself...