Sicilian judge Paolo Borsellino noted everything he found out about the entanglements between the mafia and politics in his red diary. But ever since he was assassinated in 1992, the diary has been lost without a trace. This is the inspiration for Liaty Pisani's latest spy novel. Agent Ogden sets out to track down the red diary. His search leads him into the icy spheres of the strategists who hold great power in Italy – the faces who are well known to the public, but never called to account. A tense spy thriller about the unscrupulous battle for power and privileges.

A Swiss banker is found dead and his son disappears the next day. Ogden, who has just retired from the secret service, is engaged in the role of a private detective to find the twenty-year-old Willy. But the affair is not as private as it seems at first glance. Willy knows something that cost his father his life – something to do with the whereabouts of Jewish wealth in the nineteen-forties. Willy's father showed him documents which alarm not only the banks but also a number of foreign secret services. These fifty-year-old stories are by no means forgotten, and the missing money is now in the hands of important state-leading institutions. Ogden is once again in his familiar metier. The search for Willy takes him from Zurich to the South of France where Willy, following his intuition, fled to the land of the Cathars. These heretics were fought in the Middle Ages – as were the Jews even at that time – and unnihilated in the Albigensian Crusade. Topical issues get mixed up with history, private matters mingle with political affairs, and national and temporal borders merge. Liaty Pisani approaches the theme of genocide with great sensitivity while at the same time developing an exciting plot with an almost Spielberg-like finale.

It is dangerous when a psychoanalyst violates the rules of his profession and penetrates too deeply into the life of his patients. It is similarly fatal when an international top agent suffers from a childhood trauma and this catches up with him at the wrong moment. Agent Ogden on the couch and a psychoanalyst who becomes a spy: rational calculation and ice-cold logic are certainly not the subjects of this spy novel.