The Adamantine Heart

Shortly before the reunification of West and East Germany, the body of a young woman, brutally murdered, is discovered in the quiet of a secluded forest glen below the Bavarian Alps. Detective Kommissar Roland Rieger of the Bavarian State Criminal Police is assigned to investigate the case with his rookie partner, Sylvie Schumann, a recent graduate from the police university. Despite his reputation for solving some of the most heinous crimes committed in West Germany, Rieger is forced to admit that he cannot solve this particular case, even as another body is discovered. Inexplicably, another young woman has been killed. Rieger, with the covert assistance of his Director, asks for help from an American specialist, a consultant to the FBI's Special Investigative Unit. A professor of semiotic theory, the American criminologist has pioneered the use of semiotic analysis to solve "unsolvable" cases, treating each as a unique and significant text that can be analyzed and interpreted. In The Adamantine Heart, William Russell Sheridan takes us into the exciting world of espionage, spy craft, and murder-mystery. At university, Dr. Sheridan successfully developed, applied, and published a revolutionary method for solving crimes using semiotic analysis. Autobiographical in nature, this is the first novel based on Sheridan's now declassified case files during his work as a consultant and special agent for the FBI and other agencies. Internationally renowned for his contributions to criminology, Sheridan's investigation for the Bavarian State Criminal Police takes us behind the Iron Curtain where we meet Markus Johannes Wolf, celebrated spymaster and chief of the East German foreign intelligence service (HVA). Wolf has developed a masterful plan (the ADAMAS File) to acquire hard currency to fund his country's clandestine effort to build a nuclear device (the MIJOLNIR Project) independent of the Soviet Union. In his collaboration with Detectives Roland Rieger and Sylvie Schumann from the Bavarian Criminal Police, Professor Sheridan takes the reader from East Berlin to the Soviet Union; to the diamond fields of Sierra Leone, and to Idar-Oberstein, the diamond capital of West Germany.