Lenya Fischer is the private eye equivalent of a pirate. She was in Stasi in the Eighties and never unlearned their ruthless ways.

Now she's 63 and hired to dig up dirt on Peter Brunner's Austrian lumber company Brunner Group. The client is his jealous cousin Ilsa.

Lenya needs her lover Orell Schneider's network since opaque Liechtenstein foundations own Brunner Group and hide its blackest secrets. Orell used to head up Liechtenstein's financial intelligence unit and did the same for Vatican City until he fled the Pope's trumped up charges against him. She brings him in, a car bomb kills him, and she comes home to find her house trashed and her cat hanging from a noose of piano wire. Everything is connected.

Now it's only justice for Orell or death as Lenya chases drug and gun money into Brunner Group, the Vatican Bank, and the pockets of a corrupt European establishment cornered like rats by the millions of protestors filling the streets. Globalization's upperworld criminals may just have picked the wrong fräulein to fool with.

Review from BookLife by Publishers Weekly:

Nichols’s geopolitical thriller moves at breakneck speed, as nimble and relentless as protagonist Lenya Fischer, a tenacious Stasi agent turned private investigator. The 63-year-old Fischer was born just before the Berlin Wall went up and quickly rose through the ranks of the East German security apparatus, earning the nickname Der Narwhal because a female case officer was so rare. And like this “unicorn of the sea,” Fischer is pale, “sneaky, stealthy, a deep-diver,” and “very, very cold.” After the Wall fell, Fischer began using her network of contacts to aid corporate clients. Now, upon her recent release from prison—where she was sent for bribing a police officer—Fischer’s pulled into the struggle for control of the Brunner Group, a family-owned lumber empire in Austria that’s wielded political influence since the Holy Roman Empire.

Drawing on his intelligence career, Nichols’s debut has a lived-in authenticity, and he challenges readers to keep track of its sprawling conspiracy. Ownership of the Brunner Group is split between two cousins: Fischer’s client, Ilsa Brunner, who runs a straightforward business; and Peter Brunner, whose multinational operation is a labyrinth of shell companies. When Fischer reaches out to longtime espionage contact (and on-again-off-again lover) Orell Schneider—head of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority—for help, their digging triggers a deadly response, and Fischer quickly becomes enmeshed in a vicious criminal network of blackmailers and war profiteers.

Nichols deftly explores the relationship between religion and political power, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the rise of transnational networks that operate above the law. This wide-ranging inquiry is anchored by Fischer, who blends calculated machinations with an unwavering determination to reveal the truth, no matter the consequences. In Brunner in the Black, Nichols’s skeptical hero illustrates how political zeal can morph into personal morality—and why corruption is still susceptible to a dogged, old-school investigation.

Takeaway: Fast-paced global thriller tackles entrenched villainy with righteous indignation.

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