Cambodia, 2001 - a country re-emerging from a half-century of war, genocide, famine and cultural collapse.
German Detective Maier travels to Phnom Penh, the Asian kingdom's ramshackle capital, to find the heir to a Hamburg coffee empire. As soon as the private eye and former war reporter arrives in Cambodia, his search for the young coffee magnate leads into the darkest corners of the country's history.
A beautiful, scarred woman with a mythical and frightening past, a Khmer Rouge general, an expat gangster, an old flame, a man-eating shark and a gang of teenage girl assassins lead the detective back in time, through the communist revolution and to the White Spider: a Nazi war criminal who hides amongst the detritus of another nation's collapse and reigns over an ancient Khmer temple deep in the jungles of Cambodia.
Captured and imprisoned, Maier is forced into the worst job of his life. He is to write the biography of the White Spider - a tale of mass murder that reaches from the Cambodian Killing Fields back to Europe's concentration camps - or die.
This book contains graphic violence and is not suitable for readers under the age of 18.