List $30.00

Written by Jeffrey Deaver - Audio book narrated by Jefferson Mays - Abridged Fiction - 5 COMPACT DISCS - 6 hours

Publisher, Simon & Schuster Audioworks (July 2004)

Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known equally for his brilliant tactics and for taking only "righteous" assignments. But then Paul gets caught. And the arresting officer offers him a stark choice: prison or covert government service. Paul is asked to pose as a journalist covering the summer Olympics taking place in Berlin. He's to hunt down and kill Reinhardt Ernst -- the ruthless architect of Hitler's clandestine rearmament. If successful, Paul will be pardoned and given the financial means to go legit; if he refuses the job, his fate will be Sing Sing and the electric chair.

Paul travels to Germany, takes a room in a boarding house near the Tiergarten -- the huge park in central Berlin but also, literally, the "Garden of Beasts" -- and begins his hunt. The next forty-eight hours are a feverish cat-and-mouse chase, as Paul stalks Ernst through Berlin while a dogged Berlin police officer and the entire Third Reich apparatus search frantically for the American.

Garden of Beasts features a cast of perfectly realized locals, Olympic athletes and senior Nazi officials -- some real, some fictional. With hairpin plot twists, the reigning "master of ticking-bomb suspense" (People) plumbs the nerve-jangling paranoia of prewar Berlin and steers the story to a breathtaking and wholly unpredictable ending.

About the Author: Jeffery Deaver is the author of twenty-one suspense novels, including the New York Times bestsellers The Vanished Man, The Stone Monkey, The Blue Nowhere, The Empty Chair, The Devil's Teardrop, and The Coffin Dancer, as well as The Bone Collector and Speaking in Tongues. As William Jefferies, he is the author of Shallow Graves, Bloody River Blues, and Hell's Kitchen. He is a five-time Edgar Award nominee, an Anthony Award nominee, and a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year. Deaver was born in Chicago, attended the University of Missouri, and received a law degree from Fordham University in New York.