The Lion's Den

A broken family. A new opportunity in a country on the precipice of unspeakable evil. November 1932. Seamus Ritter, a widower with four children, returns from riding the rails in an America crippled by the great depression. Realizing that his homecoming will not be how he envisioned it, and in a desperate attempt to make amends with his 16-year-old daughter, Maureen, Seamus accepts an invitation to come and work for his long-lost uncle in Berlin. With little other choice, Seamus takes the ship to Germany with his family.

Berlin 1933. The new dawn that Hitler promised has taken place. Propped up by business interests and a fragile political coalition, the Nazis and their stormtroopers start to run riot throughout the city. The ghosts of Lisa and Seamus’s recent past come back to haunt them when a figure emerges from the shadows of their lives to threaten their future. Seamus will have to protect his family, his workers and his own life from the threats against them, no matter what it takes.

Two years have passed since Hitler swept to power and the Golden Age the Nazis promised has come to pass—for some. When a mysterious fire burns down the factory, the police dismiss the investigation. Seamus will start down a path to finding the truth and discovering who has a grudge against them strong enough to risk everything. Faced with financial ruin, Seamus will have to decide to accept an offer of sale and break up his family or submit to the needs of rearming the Wehrmacht.

With the coming of the Olympic Games to Berlin, a false air of civility has taken over as the government extends a welcome to the world. But below the surface, the police state remains, and hundreds of so-called “undesirables” are rounded up and held in a newly constructed concentration camp in the city. In desperation, one of the prisoners reaches out to the Ritter family, and Maureen and her band of subversives will undertake a mission of mercy that could see them all end up as victims of the dreaded Gestapo.

The Ritter family is fractured. Maureen, Michael, and his new wife, Monika, are in exile in the city of Paris. Seamus, Lisa, and the other children remain in Berlin, where 15-year-old Fiona is falling further under the spell of Nazi propaganda. Under constant pressure to inform on her parents and impress her peers, she will soon be faced with a stark choice on which direction her life is going to take.

With the horrors of the Nazi regime becoming more apparent by the day, Maureen Ritter decides to remain in Paris. There, she meets a disturbed young man, who will change the course of history and set the match to a firestorm that will engulf the innocent Jews still in Germany. Fiona Ritter’s devotion to the Führer will be tested when the nightmare of Kristallnacht consumes Berlin. The foundations she built her life upon these last six years will be shaken, as she witnesses the horrific violence and destruction wrought that fateful night.