Known only to a few, there is a legend that a ship named the ‘Flying Dutchman’ left Nazi Germany in the last weeks of the war and set sail for America, escorted by U-boats, under a different name. Aboard was a trove of treasure and gold worth a ‘king’s ransom’.

It was said that it had been sent to a group of American Nazis to create the Fourth Reich at an appropriate time. Over the years since many expeditions off the coast had searched, but found no trace of the vessel or the treasure.

In other words, it was just a legend created to boost tourism.

…

Fast forward to 2024. Our intrepid private detective, Harry Walthenson, overhears a conversation at Grand Central Station. It was the oddness of the message that caught his attention. An investigation turned up nothing out of the ordinary, and he thinks no more about it.

Then Harry is kidnapped, interrogated, and asked questions over and over about a date and a place, why he went there, and when he could not give satisfactory answers, he was beaten half to death and left for dead on a rubbish heap. He was lucky that it was a living space for homeless men; otherwise, he would have died.

In the aftermath, he once again gives it no more thought.

…

After resolving his first case successfully, there’s no rest. Harry’s angry mother comes to his office and demands that he find out where his father has gone. She believes he has run off with a mistress, not for the first time.

Perhaps it was not the wisest decision she has made, because Harry promises to investigate, and adds that she might not like what he finds.

He soon discovered he does not like what he finds, that his father’s friends, a cabal formed at University, have two who are his mother’s current lovers, and another, a criminal blackmailing his father.

Felicity, now his partner, working on a different case, and trying to get answers, uncovers a crime family involved in guarding a disused warehouse on the docks, where she believes Harry had been taken for interrogation, and subsequently dumped nearby to die.

Why are they up to? What is so important that the empty warehouse needs guarding? Who is employing them?

Harry, following up on the death of the blackmailer, traces his death back to an enforcer employed by his grandfather. His mother’s grandfather was a pre-war industrialist who made his fortune in war munitions and shipbuilding.

He was also a member of the American Nazi party.

When Harry also discovers a logbook belonging to a so-called wartime Liberty ship the “Paul Revere” in brackets ‘Freiheitskämpfer’, hidden by his father, and written in a code that is not readily identifiable.

It is no longer a matter of a father who has run off with his mistress; it is a very frightened man in fear of his life, running from a group who will stop at nothing to get the logbook back. And when Harry discovers a family connection to the group, it becomes a race against time to decode the log and find his father before his grandfather does.

…

Coming soon: Harry Walthenson’s new adventure – A case of finding the ‘Flying Dutchman’