From international bestselling author Craig Russell comes a modern Gothic masterpiece Six confined psychopaths. A killer on the loose 1935. As Europe prepares itself for a calamitous war, six homicidal lunatics - the so-called 'Devil's Six' - are confined in a remote castle asylum in rural Czechoslovakia. Each patient has their own dark story to tell and Dr Viktor Kosarek, a young psychiatrist using revolutionary techniques, is tasked with unlocking their murderous secrets. At the same time, a terrifying killer known as 'Leather Apron' is butchering victims across Prague. Successfully eluding capture, it would seem his depraved crimes are committed by the Devil himself. Maybe they are... and what links him with the insane inmates of the Castle of the Eagles? Only the Devil knows. And it is up to Viktor to find out. 'A superior thriller, at once stylish, absorbing and compulsive; the strands of tension are brilliantly sustained throughout. Not only is it a taut and chilling tale, expertly crafted against the backdrop of ethnic tensions in pre-Second World War Czechoslovakia, but also a fascinating study of the complexities of the human mind . . . I was gripped from the very first page right up to that haunting denouement' -Laura Carlin, author of The Wicked Cometh

Author Biography

Craig Russell's novels have been published in twenty-five languages, four have been made into major films in Germany, in one of which he has a cameo role as a detective. He has won the CWA Dagger in the Library and the McIlvanney Prize (for which he has been shortlisted another twice), and has previously been shortlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, and the SNCF Prix Polar in France. A former police officer, Craig Russell is the only non-German to have been awarded the Polizeistern - the Hamburg Police's Police Star. When not writing, Craig Russell paints, cooks and reads, but not simultaneously.