Judgment at the Legation
A Legal Thriller

About this book:

In the frozen ruins of post-war Vienna, the Swedish Legation has become the last courtroom in Europe. General Erich von Haffen—architect of the Steyr massacres—sits in a drafty drawing room, shuffling chess pieces while a mob howls for his blood at the gates. Major Robert Vance has twenty-four hours to convict him before the Soviets arrive, the power fails, or the crowd breaks through. His only ally is Daniel Miller, a washed-up New York insurance lawyer who defends war criminals because someone has to, and his only judge is an Austrian jurist who spent four years hiding in an attic.

The trial is a fiction. The evidence is thin. The defense is a confession wrapped in the Geneva Conventions. But as the temperature drops and the perimeter wire snaps, the proceedings become something far more dangerous than a show trial: a contest over whether law can exist at all when civilization has already collapsed. Vance believes in the system. Miller believes in the loophole. Von Haffen believes in the arithmetic of survival. And outside, the snow keeps falling, covering the tracks of what really happened at the rail junction in Steyr.

*Judgment at the Legation* is a legal thriller forged in the crucible of 1945—where every objection is a lifeline, every witness a liability, and the verdict may not matter if the building doesn't survive until dawn. For readers who love the moral complexity of *The Reader* and the claustrophobic tension of *The Spy Who Came in from the Cold*, this is courtroom drama at the edge of the abyss.