Chameleon Series

He will risk everything for his country, he'll die to stop Hitler becoming Chancellor, he will kill to protect his friends, he would die for his country. Meet the Chameleon...  Inspired by real events: Kurt is a good-looking Lutheran from the slums of Berlin. An orphan of WWI, taken in and raised by a wealthy Jewish couple, Mamma and Papa Kaufmann, who give him not only a loving home, but the best advantages money can buy. Amidst the political turmoil of the late 1920s, Kurt is seemingly uninterested by the radicalism of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. Kurt is accepted into the Prussian War Academy as an officer cadet. Over the next two years, Kurt proves himself to be an exceptional cadet and soon comes to the notice of Oberst Count Max von Wallenberg, head of a covert Abwehr Counterespionage unit, and steps are put into motion to recruit him.      On the eve of Kurt's commissioning as an officer, Papa Kaufmann is gunned down by Nazis outside his office. It's a devastating blow for Kurt, and an epiphany.      Kurt is mysteriously sent from the academy to the Bavarian Alps to undergo months of gruelling and top secret "special training". When he returns to Berlin as a commissioned Leutnant, realising that someone is pulling strings, he is finally recruited to the Abwehr.      1932, Max meets an old war friend from the Austrian police, Oscar Schmidt, who has a very interesting and scandelous story to tell about Hitler's wilderness years in Vienna and his friendship with a blackmailer, art forger and murderer, Philip Beck. Beck is in Germany and was arrested and detained until Oskar arrived to take him back to Vienna, where he is wanted for murdering his landlord/lover. Only someone let him go and now Beck is on the run ... or is head?      Oskar tells Max that while investigating Beck, he discovered there is a police dossier on Hitler, a dossier that mysteriously went missing in 1923. Oskar tells Max that the dossier was taken by Major Burgamann, head of the Austrian Secret police and contains information that would destroy Hitler's credibility.      Hitler's friend and chauffeur, Julius Schreck sends the homicidal maniac Bruno Metz to Austria to find the missing dossier. But the dossier has been taken to safety by Burgamann's secretary , and the Major suffers a heart attack and dies before Bruno can find anything out.     Meanwhile, iIn France, Hrach is hiding out, waiting for his old friend, Marcus Wolff a shady character from the Munich criminal underworld, has promised to buy the Hitler dossier from him, so Hrach can escape. But Bruno Metz is hot on the trail. bSo is the Abwehr, who learn that Wolff has a secret address in a boarding house run by a lesbian opera singer, Fräulein Georg , where Wolff's gay lover lives. Max realises that they have to get an agent into the house to intercept the dossier as soon as Marcus Wolff shows up with it. There's just one problem: The house on Türkenstrasse is no ordinary boarding house; the tenants are all gay young artists. Boris, who suspects that Kurt is gay, suggests that Kurt would be ideal for the mission. He even has a talent for drawing, Boris tells Max.      In the Türkenstrasse house, Kurt soon falls into the Bohemian lifestyle and falls deeply in love with Wolff's lover, Xavier Knopp, who has Asperger's. Soon, Kurt will not only have to fight for his own life, he'll have to fight to save the lives of his friends and lover and a deadly and bloody duel ensues that will leave many people dead, and Kurt's true skill as a marksman comes into its own…

Kurt, haunted by the bloody events in Bavaria (Book 1, "Chameleon") is avowed to destroy the Nazis by any means he can. Nobody suspects him as being the mysterious marksman during the Bavarian Affair, "Chameleon", and with everyone involved apart from Kurt being dead, his identity remains safe for now. But Kurt has become a killer now, and after executing Meister in revenge for murdering Hauptmann Wagner, he becomes a fully committed member of the "Graf von Hagendorf Orchestra", dedicated to Ridding Germany of Hitler by legal means or fowl. He's now a man who lives by the law of the gun, choosing Gestapo sadists to kill in his spare time, while in his day job, he is one of the Abwehr's brightest counterespionage agents, hot on the heels of a Russian NKVD spy ring.      Meanwhile, Hitler is summoned to von Hindenburg's country estate and ordered to either curtail Ernst Röhm and the SA, or he will be sacked as chancellor and replaced by a military panel, Hitler must choose between power and killing a friend…      As the infamous Night of the Long Knives unfurls, Kurt is deep in treason and retribution, as well as dealing with his personal secrets and demons, haunted with grief for his lover Xavier, "Chameleon" murdered by the Nazis.      Unbeknown to Kurt, Hauptmann Wagner's happy-go-lucky son Richard has been denounced as a homosexual and is arrested by the Gestapo. After months of torture and abuse in a Gestapo prison, Richard is sent to the infamous Dachau Concentration Camp, where Hell meets reality, and for many harrowing months, he must endure the unendurable; orgies of violence and inhumanity, breaking him body and soul. Weak, hungry and systematically brutalized, all hope has gone and only despair remains. Richard knows he's just weeks from death…      Back in Berlin, Kurt learns through a surprising informant, that his old Hauptmann's son is in Dachau, and with an audacious plan, he resolves to rescue him before it's too late…      But this is a tale of Three Men who share the same secret, so meet Untersturmführer Victor Graf von Ritter, who might be termed a reluctant Nazi. Reluctant or not, Victor is young and ambitious and he has a policeman's mind, which soon gets him noticed in Berlin. He is summoned to Berlin to help investigate the theft of a Gestapo list. The investigation soon spirals into something far more sinister, when witnesses start being murdered, and military intelligence reports on the Soviet Union are found in the luggage of a courier shot dead by border police at the German-Austrian border, events that will throw Victor and Kurt into the same fateful trajectory.      On his return to Berlin from Dachau with Richard, Kurt is informed of the border shooting and the War Ministry plans that have been found, and is ordered to liaise with Untersturmführer Graf von Ritter of the SD. When Kurt and Victor meet at a murder scene, they're both horrified, realising they had met once before, the previous year in more, intimate circumstances. But can they put aside their personal feelings and their shared secret to work together and identify the sinister foreign power or organisation behind the forgeries and halt an atrocity they're planning at the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally? Can Kurt put duty and country before his desire to see Hitler and his cronies dead...?   

Chris Black brings you the THIRD nail-biting thriller in the Chameleon series, is full of twists and turns and simply dripping with historical facts and events unfurling seamlessly throughout, along with the omnipresent apparatus of Himmler and Heydrich's evil legions. Hitler draws up his plans of conquest in Eastern Europe while the western powers adopt appeasement in the face of Hitler's aggression. A terrible secret is out, a SS Dr. is murdered and a pitiless evil is exposed, with a horrifying vision of what is yet to come. The Gestapo are closing in on the enigmatic assassin known as the "Ghost" ... Or are they? Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel) Graf von Hagendorf dispatches Kurt, Codename "Chameleon" on a secret mission to Switzerland, to find the Brotherhood of the Blood Eagle, who assassinated Vrubel and the Rogue Czechs: "Chameleon, the Terror Begins". He's about to return to Germany empty-handed, when the mysterious "Maximilian Dracon" engages him in conversation. But Herr Dracon is far more than a lonely old man looking for a conversation, as Kurt quickly learns. Kurt is on a deadly mission … to resist the Nazis by any and all means he can. The von Wallenberg Orchestra joins forces with the mysterious Brotherhood of the Blood Eagle in their deadly resistance to the Nazi regime. The past comes back to haunt Kurt, when "Mischa: book one, Chameleon" confesses he can identify Kurt as the Abwehr agent in the Türkenstrasse House "Chameleon", but unseen forces are at work… Richard "Chameleon, the Terror Begins" is drafted into the army. Victor, "The Terror Begins" must choose between his friendship with Kurt and his duty to the SD. In a world of secrets, lies, murder and conspiracy, it's hard to know who your friends really are.

It's 1938, and Europe teeters on the precipice of World War II. The main western allies, Britain and France, beset with fear of a second continental war, procrastinate and appease the Führer in his demands. With the fall of Austria come terrible pogroms against the Jews, political opponents and the gay community. Kurt codename "Chameleon" is sent to Prague just before the 1938 Munich Crisis, to obtain information on a mole working inside General Keitel's office at OKW, working for Czech Military Intelligence; and to foil a secret False Flag plot by Heydrich and Himmler to blow up the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin and a Berlin passenger train during the rush hour in order to blame it on the Czechs with fake evidence, to create a pretext for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, Abwehr Agent Kasper Eberhardt has gone missing in Paris after collecting a book containing details of Himmler's deadly plan and the Abwehr want it, to expose the SS for the gangsters they are. Victor is closing in on the assassin known as the "Ghost". He may not like what he finds… Apart from his work as an Abwehr agent and plotter against the regime, Kurt continues executing SS men from the concentration camps. Kurt and Richard grow closer through absence, but can they possibly become lovers…? Kristallnacht presents Göring with a headache, whilst the small but growing group of plotters in the "von Wallenberg Orchestra" gains new and powerful friends in General Beck and Hans Oster.