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  • Location: Prague

The Widow Killer

The Widow Killer

Why a Booktrail?

WW2 – In the final days of the Third Reich, a serial killer is stalking the streets of Prague…

  • ISBN: 978-0312252892
  • Translator: Neil Bermel
  • Genre: Crime, Historical

What you need to know before your trail

A vicious serial killer is stalking the women, widows, of Prague, torturing them before killing them. The authorities are trying desperately to find out who this killer is and to catch him before he strikes again. A rather naive Czech detective gets to work and forms a partnership with a Gestapo officer and together they search for this man who is bringing terror and violence to a city already drowning in it.

How will a German Gestapo agent and a Czech detective even be able to come together and work for the common good? The city behind them is crumbling as is the Nazi regime and the people of Prague are in the grip of civil war which threatens to break out and change everything.

Travel Guide

An interesting premise to have a murder mystery take place not just in Prague but in the city at a time which was so historically significant in real life.

With the Nazi regime on its knees, the power of the Nazis and their legacy is fading yet the Gestapo is still feared and unwelcome in Prague.

How can he search for a killer when he represents the most murderous rampage in history – the Nazi regime and all that it entails.

Prague is a city in flux for the uprising of 1945 is just around the corner and when this happens the whole status quo changes and both men are forced to face up with the new challenges this represents. The world is changing and fast. Everything is uncertain and damaged and in the midst of all this, there is a killer on the loose – chaos amidst chaos makes for a very unsettled yet fascinating world.

This Prague seen through the eyes of two so very different characters from both sides of the historical fence. with the police, the gestapo and the murderer all trying to save themselves in an imploding world.

Prague uprising

The last half of the book, set in the five days of the 1945 Prague uprising, the killing spree, the Nazi regime and the Czech uprising all come to the fore.

“Could Hitler somehow derive some perverted satisfaction from the worldwide butchery he’d unleashed as the unknown murderer did from his slaughter of women?”

Is killing for any reason ever justified? Is good and evil the same outside of war they are inside it?

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