The Man Who Calculated Death

Suzanne and Stephanie visit Tante Heide in Sacramento, California, where the sisters’ beloved aunt has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Realizing that time is running out to get the family story straight, the sisters ask difficult questions - with answers that are not black and white. Back on their odyssey through Germany, the whispers of the dead swirl around them as they walk the dark, dank tunnels of a concentration camp where the V1s were made. When Suzanne tracks down a Holocaust survivor who assembled her grandfather's flying bombs, she finds a surprising moment of grace.

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In the aftermath of the fire bombing, Robert Lusser’s family finds shelter in an abandoned mansion while he heads to a remote island in the Baltic Sea. This is where he must perfect his "wonder weapon" - a never before seen flying bomb that will become the world's first cruise missile. In their search for how their grandfather managed this achievement, Stephanie and Suzanne go behind the locked gates of a ruined military base with an engineer-turned-historian who knows exactly who their grandfather was - and what he did.

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Suzanne and Stephanie investigate their family's experience in the long-ago fire bombing of Kassel, Germany that killed 10,000 civilians in a single night. As they learn more about their grandfather's career, they uncover an intriguing--and frightening--turn, when he came up against one of Adolf Hitler’s infamous “blood judges.” Then, they learn that Robert Lusser moved his family to Kassel--a favorite Allied bombing target—in the first place because of an offer to lead of one of the Nazis most important--and top secret--weapons projects.

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Suzanne and Stephanie Rico dig through their deceased mother's office searching for clues to their dark legacy--a flying bomb built in World War II by a brilliant Nazi grandfather they've never met. We learn more about their mother's extraordinary life, her death, and how the sisters' quest to understand their own troubled ancestry began. When the tantes, Aunt Heide and Aunt Traute, help create an itinerary through Germany, the odyssey will take Suzanne and Stephanie from the remote ruins of a military base to an underground concentration camp to the Bavarian farmhouse where their grandmother died in 1945. 

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Suzanne and Stephanie begin at their mother’s childhood home in Augsburg, where they’re faced with a difficult question: as granddaughters of a man who created a weapon of mass destruction for the Nazis, what responsibility do they bear? From tattered letters, photographs, and home movies from their mother’s early days, the sisters piece together their grandfather’s life, and their grandparents’ love story. Then, they discover a well kept family secret with dangerous undertones.

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In 2013, journalist Suzanne Rico gets the call. Her mother, Gabriele, is dying. As time ticks down, Gabriele reveals an unfinished memoir about her World War II childhood–and makes a daunting last request: “Finish what I started.” When Suzanne and her sister, Stephanie, dive into their mother’s turbulent past, they come face to face with the truth of their own ancestry for the first time, including mind blowing mysteries that swirl around inventor Robert Lusser–their grandfather–and his work for the Third Reich. As they struggle to bring closure to something as intimate as a memoir, they have no idea of the revelations in store, or the reckoning they will require.

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