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Köln, im Jahre 1260: Die einstmals kleine Stadt hat sich zu einem der größten Pilgerorte der Christenheit entwickelt, wenn auch mit unfertiger Kathedrale. Aber nicht nur Gläubige zieht das fromme Treiben an, sondern auch Diebe, Strolche und Mörder.

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It´s the year 1260 and the great cathedral - the most ambitious building in all of Christendom - is rising above the streets of Cologne. Far below its soaring spires and flying buttresses, an assassin of unnatural talent surveys his new hunting ground.

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It´s the year 1260 and the great cathedral - the most ambitious building in all of Christendom - is rising above the streets of Cologne. Far below its soaring spires and flying buttresses, an assassin of unnatural talent surveys his new hunting ground.

More shadow than man, the assassin is quick to take his first life. But there is a witness to his crime: a flame-haired thief known as Jacob the Fox. Justly terrified by the black-clad spectre, Jacob runs for his life, convinced that he´s pursued by the Angel of Death itself.

For all his street-smart cunning, the wily Fox cannot shake off the assassin - a cruel, efficient murderer who favours a pistol-grip crossbow as his weapon of choice. Fate, injury and desperation lead Jacob to seek help from a beautiful clothes dyer, her drunken rascal of a father, and her learned uncle, a man of God who loves a battle of wits almost as much as he loves a bottle of wine.

With the threat of an untimely death at the end of a crossbow bolt never far way, Jacob´s unlikely cabal find themselves faced with a conspiracy born of an unquenchable thirst for revenge, a conspiracy that threatens to tear Cologne apart and stain the city with blood.

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Schätzing, Frank
Frank Schätzing is the author of the international bestseller The Swarm, which turned him into Germany´s most successful thriller writer in decades. A winner of the 2004 Corine Prize, and the 2005 German Science Fiction Prize, Schätzing lives and works in Cologne.

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