The Warsaw Anagrams

The bestselling author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon delivers a wartime thriller that's "equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring, and intelligent" (San Francisco Chronicle).

With his international-bestseller The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Richard Zimler made a name as a master of historical thrillers. In this chilling mystery, winner of the Marques de Ouro Prize, Zimler has woven a gripping tale in the tradition of The Shadow of the Wind.

It is autumn, 1940, and the Nazis have sealed four-hundred-thousand Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto. Erik Cohen, an elderly psychiatrist, moves into a tiny apartment with his last remaining relatives. Then his beloved great-nephew Adam goes missing and his body is discovered tangled in the barbed wire, strangely mutilated. Soon afterward, another body turns up, this time a young girl. Could there be a Jewish traitor luring children to their deaths? With an unlikely hero and hair-raising suspense, The Warsaw Anagrams is a profoundly moving and darkly atmospheric thriller.

"Part murder mystery and part historical fiction . . . Thrilling." —The Boston Globe

"A gripping, heartbreaking and beautiful thriller." —Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times–bestselling author of The Romanovs

"Spare but striking prose . . . Masterful." —Newsday

"A fast-moving, powerful and intellectual murder mystery set within wartime Warsaw Poland during World War II . . . Zimler provides layer after layer of intrigue and excitement. This is not simply a novel about the Holocaust. It is a murder mystery that will challenge the reader to uncover a frightening truth within a world turned upside down by war and genocide." —New York Journal of Books