Who has Buried the Dead --- an overview of the novel

Who Has Buried The Dead turns on secrets. One is buried in the deep, dark forest of Katyn, Poland; the other secret is in the pages of a notebook hidden in an otherwise unremarkable café in an ancient middle European city. The Scottish Book was an actual, yet obscure, work of intellectual gamesmanship created by a highly specialized group of professors, primarily pure mathematicians, who met at a local pub called the Scottish Café in Lwów, Poland, near the medieval university.

In 1939, as the Nazis overran Poland, The Book mysteriously vanished from its hiding place in the café. Some of its contributors avoided certain death by fleeing Poland to America, where a select few found themselves in Los Alamos, New Mexico working in the top-secret Manhattan Project - the world’s first Atomic Bomb and, ultimately, its deadly successor, the far more powerful Hydrogen Bomb.

Who has Buried the Dead has no characters with fanciful names and improbable personality traits, for it is not a tale about superheroes or villains- but rather about ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things and existing in times where nightmares never end.

The novel spans three continents and has a cast of characters which are truly remarkable.Like many legitimate works accurately reflecting the complex time period existing between 1939 and 1945, some characters like Stalin, Zhukov and Beria were authentic- often horrifically so— in the same manner in which other main characters were fictitious but tragically human as they are caught in the vortex of war. Real but little-known are places like Bad Nenndorf, the British interrogation center for hard-core Nazis before they were sent to ‘Ashcan,’ the manor house near London for a three-dimensional and certainly more aggressive “debriefing”; Wünsdorf, the principal oversight warren for the Wehrmacht OKW during World War Two and the victorious Soviet Occupation forces in the Cold War Era; and the tragic Hill of Goats located in that brooding forest of lost souls—a place called Katyn where thousands of Poles were murdered and buried in pits.

Some thoughts to keep uppermost in your mind as you read Who has Buried the Dead, which took many years to research and write: What did The Scottish Book contain that led the NKVD, Gestapo and the Allies on a desperate search, using any means, to find it? Why has its existence not factored into the history of the Second World War?

What is ultimately revealed within The Scottish Book that brought mortal enemies and their top spy operatives into a deadly contest for its discovery and ultimate seizure? After years of in-depth research, the author believes he has discovered an extremely plausible look into what might have been and, in all probability, was one of the last great secrets of the Second World War.