The Terror Begins (Chameleon, #2) / Chameleon (ePub)

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...?