Purgatory

The second novel in the acclaimed, best-selling Euro-crime series that began with the Hercule Poirot Award winner, Absinthe. If the world will end in flames, who is stoking the fire? Walter Eekhaut, the veteran chief inspector from the Brussels police force who has a problem with authority, remains in Amsterdam, where he was dispatched to aid the Dutch security service. When his boss, Chief Superintendent Alexandra Dewaal, receives a tip from one of her informants, the two find themselves across the border in his home country, tramping in the Belgian Ardennes on a frigid January day. What they find is macabre and horrific: seven charred human bodies, attached to tall stakes with chains, in an almost perfect circle. From the look of it, these people were burned alive in some sort of ritual. On the wall of a cabin, Eekhaut and Dewaal find the enigmatic message: "This World seems to last Forever. But it is merely the Dream of a Sleeper." Similar...