CHRISTOPHER MATTHEW

THE AMBER ROOM.

Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995.

 

 

September 12th 1941 and the German army is at the gates of Pushkin, twenty-five kilometres south of Leningrad.  Behind the closed shutters of the Catherine Palace is the fabled Amber Room.  Carved from six tons of Baltic amber for the Emperor of Prussia’s palace in Königsberg and presented to Tsar Peter the Great in 1716, it is one of Russia’s most prized possessions, and the Germans want it back.

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A team of experts is working day and night in a desperate bid to remove and conceal the two hundred delicately carved panels, but time is not on their side.  Within hours, the Germans are in the palace and the panels are on their way back to Königsberg.

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Four years later, as the Russian troops advance on the town, orders are sent from Berlin to remove the Room to a secret destination…

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It has never been seen again.

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Or has it?  When ex-army officer and freelance journalist Miles Maltby joins a run-of-the-mill press trip to the ski resort of Eigerhubel in the Swiss Alps, he stumbles on an extraordinary story, and sets off on a journey of high adventure through Germany and Holland to London, Copenhagen, Latvia and Estonia and back again to Switzerland, and on the way unravels one of the strangest mysteries of the Second World War.

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Reviews: 

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This is a thriller hot in excitement but set in circumstances of extreme cold….Thoroughly recommended for those days when a blizzard makes ski-ing impossible.  Douglas Hurd, Daily Telegraph

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Matthew plots cunningly and writes formidably, supplying a great, swerving run for one’s money. 

John Coleman, Sunday Times

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Rousingly done, Buchanish adventure.  Philip Oakes, Literary Review