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Brunner in the Black

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Pub Date 9 Jan 2026 | Archive Date 15 Apr 2026

Gritfiction Ltd. | Close to the Bone


Description

Featured in The Optionist, former Hollywood Reporter books editor Andy Lewis' Substack on novels that should be turned into TV shows and films.

"It's got a great throwback vibe that calls to mind ace '70s conspiracy thriller writers like Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, and Robert Ludlum...

Lenya is a first-rate character. She's part Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, part James Bond, and part John Wick wrapped in the body of a sixtysomething woman... They're younger, but picture Cate Blanchett (56) or Charlize Theron (50) as Lenya."

-The Optionist 

"A vast and immersive international crime thriller...

Lenya is a brilliant protagonist... Nichols manages to pack the last 50 years of European conflict and interconnection into her personal history... 

As the story unfolds, the vision of our tenuous global economy and democratic order that emerges is more terrifying than anything hidden in a Liechtenstein bank. Readers will undoubtedly look forward to Lenya's next case."

-Kirkus Reviews

"Nichols’s geopolitical thriller moves at breakneck speed, as nimble and relentless as protagonist Lenya Fischer, a tenacious Stasi agent turned private investigator...​​

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."

-BookLife by Publisher's Weekly

"A gritty, globe-spanning thriller with brains, bite, and a heroine whose resolve to expose the truth threatens the world's most powerful institutions...

Lenya's not your typical heroine... She's a woman who commands respect in a field built for men. She's not chasing redemption, she enforces her own kind of justice, and she's terrifyingly good at it. I loved how Nichols doesn't let age soften her character. Loyal, brave, relentless, and dangerously smart, she navigates the chaos with the agility of someone half her age..."

-Independent Book Review

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.


Featured in The Optionist, former Hollywood Reporter books editor Andy Lewis' Substack on novels that should be turned into TV shows and films.

"It's got a great throwback vibe that calls to mind ace...


Available Editions

ISBN 9798262559213
PRICE
PAGES 322

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