Burke has done a few historical novels before, but none quite, I think, as full-blooded as this. Taking in the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the death camps, the Texas oil boom, the rise of Hollywood and a few walk-on gangsters, this epic of love and honour and integrity struggling to survive in a tarnished, corrupt and violent world, as the spirit, if not the creed, that drove the Nazi tiger tanks through the Ardennes forest arises again and starts to devour the soul of the United States from the inside out. Weldon Holland and Hershel Pine rescue Rosita Lowenstein from a Nazi extermination camp, but can they build a business based on the technology of their enemies and thrive in a moral swamp that tries to suck them down and make them as bad as everyone else.

All the usual Burke themes of spiritual good and evil, and trying to make sense of a fallen world with beautifully atmospheric purple prose, wounded men, strong women and deplorable billionaires.