"Europe, 1940: Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into the monastery at Villers-devant-Orval just before Nazi art thieves plan to sweep through the area and whisk everything of value back to Berlin. But the ersatz man of the cloth is no thief. Instead, that night he adds an old leather Bible to the monastery's library and then escapes. London, 2018: A construction worker makes a grisly discovery--a skeletal arm bone with a rusty handcuff attached to the wrist. Was this the site of a long-forgotten prison, uncharted on any map? One observer knows better: it's all that remains of a courier who died in a V-2 rocket attack. The woman who will put these two disparate events together--and understand the looming tragedy she must hurry to prevent--is Russian historian and former Soviet chess champion Larissa Mendelova Klimt, 'Lara the Bookworm' to her friends."--Jacket.