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I’ve very excited about the new novel I’m currently writing  whose working title is The Nuremberg Quest.  

In the dead of night three men emerge from a truck and haul heavy metal chests into a tunnel deep beneath Nuremberg Castle. Their cargo consists of the most valuable collection of treasures in all Europe. It consists of the thousand year old imperial relics of the Holy Roman Empire: the jewelled crown and coronation robes of Charlemagne, and the sacred lance that had pierced Christ’s side on Golgotha Hill. These relics represent the ultimate in political, mystical and symbolic power, and whoever owns them will be the most powerful ruler on earth. That’s why Hitler is desperate to possess them. Having them would legitimise his claim to be emperor of the Fourth Reich. And that’s why Hitler’s deputy, Himmler, has hidden them deep underground, and sworn to secrecy the men he has tasked with concealing them. Noone must know where the treasures are until the Fourth Reich has been established. But another man is determined to stop at nothing to find the Relics of the Holy Roman Empire and thwart Himmler’s plot for Nazi domination of the world. Konrad Schumann.

It’s 1945, the Third Reich has been defeated, and an American lieutenant attached to Military Intelligence has been sent to Germany to recover works of art stolen by the Nazis. Konrad Schumann has unique qualifications: he is a prominent art historian and he speaks German. Konrad was born in Germany but fled to the United States in 1938. And now he is on the trail of hidden masterpieces of stolen art and nothing will stop him until he finds them. So begins one of the most thrilling true searches for buried treasure in history, the search for the Relics of the Holy Roman Empire.

It began when a German POW he was interrogating whispered the secret of Blacksmiths Alley… and a few hours later he was found dead in his cell.

Blacksmiths Alley. The name rang a bell. Konrad had heard it before but where? Then he remembered.  He heard it from a mysterious woman he met in Paris, an art historian like himself, who knew more about the whereabouts of stolen art than anyone else. Jeanne Bouvier was the curator of a small gallery in Paris where Goering stored stolen paintings.

Konrad had met his match. As passionate about art as he was, and as enraged by the enormity of Nazi plunder, she had outwitted Goering by secretly recording details about the art he plundered. After the war however, she refused  to share the contents of her notebooks with the Americans whom she didn’t trust. But as her relationship with Konrad became more intimate, she began to divulge the secrets of her notebooks. And that’s when she mentioned Blacksmiths Alley. She longed to confront Goering who was complicit in the greatest art theft in history.  She finally got her wish: just before the Nuremberg Trials she was smuggled into Goering’s cell and got the opportunity to confront the Nazi she despised.

When Konrad embarks on a search for the hidden treasure he is frustrated at every step. For one thing, the prominent office-holders of Nuremberg are former Nazis who try to stop him from discovering the secret of Blacksmiths Alley. Even his superior, Captain Leighton, frustrates his efforts to follow clues to the hidden treasure.

Konrad discovers that it was Himmler who had ordered the Holy Relics to be concealed beneath Nuremberg Castle. Inside the thick stone walls of Himmler’s Gothic castle, someone is lying in wait to kill him.  But Himmler isn’t the only one who is obsessed by mystical ideas of past glory. It turns out that Konrad’s American general, George Patton, is also on the trail of the Holy Roman Relics. 

Will Konrad find the Holy Roman Relics? And when he does, who will get to keep them? Germany, Austria, or General Patton?

The Nuremberg Quest is based on an extraordinary true story I discovered in the footnotes of the history of World War II.

And the German-American resembled the hero of an adventure novel, a true-life Indiana Jones who risked his life and his career in pursuit of an improbable dream: to find the Holy Roman Relics. The more I read, the more excited I became. I could see his story as the basis for a political thriller, a detective story, and a love story. The Da Vinci Code meets Indiana Jones in the ruins of postwar Nuremberg.