Rome, 1944. While the Allies are fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, the capital city lives the most dramatic days of Nazi occupation: curfew, hunger, arrests and deportation, mass murder... Martin Bora, the Wehrmacht officer and protagonist of Lumen and Liar Moon has the complex and delicate task of solving not one, but three murders. The victims are a young German embassy employee who “accidentally” fell to her death from a fourth-floor window, a Roman society lady found dead on the scene of a most objectionable love tryst, and a headstrong cardinal of the Roman Curia, personally known to Bora and, like the officer, secretly active in the resistance against the Third Reich. With Italian police inspector Sandro Guidi at his side, Bora sets off to establish the truth and unmask the culprit. What he discovers in the end – after an investigation on the brink of self-destruction, obstructed by “friends” and “foes” alike, face-to-face with historical characters like Field Marshal Kesselring and Monsignor Montini (the future Pope Paul VI).