Description
The crime that rocked an empire struck in 1909, when a young officer in Franz j25ef’s army, passed over for promotion, was accused of mailing poisoned “aphrodisiac” capsules to ten members of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army’s General Staff. The agonising death of the one officer who swallowed a capsule, Captain Richard Mader, not only brought about an unsavoury scandal in glittering Vienna but set off one of the most extraordinary investigations on- record: the confrontation between Judge Advocate Emil Kunze and the accused, First Lieutenant Peter Dorfrichter. Kunze, facing the strikingly handsome, self-confident, intelligent Dorfrichter, had to admit that his suspect was a most unlikely murderer.
The battles of wit between the two men, their games of cat and mouse, their mutual dependence on each other, complicated by Kunze’s growing emotional involvement with his suspect, became a cause célèbre, ultimately commanding the attention of Franz j25ef himself. When the ageing emperor ordered justice be done, no matter the cost to his empire or to Europe’s oldest royal house, he helped set the stage for the collapse of his monarchy.
The Devil’s Lieutenant is a darkly compelling novel of the single-minded pursuit of justice and of a man whose major crime was seeing all too clearly the shape of the war that was to come and how it would destroy the very monarchy that it was his duty to protect. It presents, in vivid and unforgettable detail, a world of charm and enchantment facing disaster and is a brilliant study of the inflexible reasoning of men who would murder for it and who would, within the decade, see it crumble and disappear.
Hardcover, 381 pages. In very good pre-loved condition with the exception of some slight yellowing to pages and a tear and creasing to the dustcover.