"Beautifully written, intricate and entrancing."—Jaroslaw Anders, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob Tausk: a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends into every corner of the province and beyond, enlisting union organizers, financiers, aristocrats and their servants, and a young novelist and playwright, newly arrived in the Vienna of Franz Josef and Freud, hungry for literary success.