The body of 92-year-old Jossi Goldberg, Holocaust survivor
and American citizen, is found shot to death execution
style
in his house near Frankfurt. A five-digit number is
scrawled
in blood at the murder scene. The autopsy reveals an old
and
unsuccessfully covered tattoo on the corpse's arm—a blood
type marker once used by Hitler's SS.

Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver Bodenstein are faced with a
riddle.

Was the old man not Jewish after all? Who was he, really?

Two more, similar murders happen—one of a wheelchair-bound
old lady in a nursing home, and one of a man with a cellar
filled with Nazi paraphernalia—and slowly the connections
between the victims becomes evident: All of them were
lifelong friends with Vera von Kaltensee, baroness,
well-respected philanthropist, and head of an old, rich
family that she rules with an iron fist.

Pia and Oliver follow the trail, which leads them all the
way back to the end of World War II and the area of Poland
that then belonged to East Prussia. No one is who they
claim
to be, and things only begin to make sense when the two
investigators realize what the bloody number stands for,
and
uncover an old diary and an eyewitness who is finally
willing to come forward.

Nele Neuhaus's The Ice Queen is a character- and
plot-driven mystery about revenge, power, and long-
forgotten
and covered up secrets from a time in German history that
still affects the present.