Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two teenage girls are brutally murdered and a third kidnapped in Eden Highlands, a quiet Southern California community north of San Diego. It takes a down-on-his-luck freelance writer, Jack Sothern, to connect the crimes to the long-missing diary kept by Erich Mielke, sadistic head of East Germany's Ministry of State Security. The diary's mother lode of state secrets is potentially worth millions in a bidding war among countries. Deals are struck, treachery substitutes for truth and the body count rises in a non-stop series of page-turning revelations as Sothern races to save the kidnapped girl and redeem his honor.