Reiner's Most Recent Novels

In 1019, after burying her husband in Greenland, Bergthora Bjornsdóttir returns to Iceland to exact her revenge for a violent act she suffered as a young girl. But in her hunger for vengeance she drives Engilborg, the young wife of Egill—a powerful and ruthless chieftain—into the arms of her uncle, Leif, shattering the lives of family and friends in the rural community along Hvamms Fjord. 

Kjartan, Engilborg’s father—who spent 15 years in Constantinople as a Varangian warrior, so he could buy back his family’s farm—struggles to protect his family from shame and ruin. Ægileif, a seeress obsessed with Egill, uses her witchcraft in a desperate attempt to win his love while Óstarki, her enigmatic son, seeks to reclaim the moral compass his mother has abandoned. 

Spanning across four decades and geographical settings that include Iceland, Greenland, and North America, as well as present-day Switzerland, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, and Syria, we follow these men and women as they navigate the struggles of pastoral farming, war, family life, and death while searching for a path from their heathen past to a Christian future. Secrets surface, friendships fracture, and long-buried animosities culminate in a gripping tale of honor, betrayal, friendship, faith, and heathen magic.

Frederick County, Maryland, September 1944. Florian Schneider, a code breaker for the German Army, is interned at POW Branch Camp 6. Many of his fellow inmates most of them seasoned Afrika Korps veterans mistrust the taciturn soldier, whose rank belies his education and his excellent command of the English language. He is assigned to work on the farm of Vivian Klein, whose daughter, Mary, has moved back home for the remainder of the war while her husband is fighting in the Pacific. An unlikely, complicated romance ensues between Mary and Schneider. Once Schneider earns the trust of his peers by saving the life of Bernd Wagner, he dares to propose to them the impossible a plan for escape: After a performance of Coriolanus by the German soldiers for their American captors on New Year's Eve, a group of German soldiers will steal a car and head for the New Jersey coast. Schneider knows that two spies enlisted to sabotage the Manhattan Project are scheduled to be delivered via submarine to the coast off Maine around New Years Day 1945. Schneider believes in the slight chance that he and his fellow escapees may be able to radio the sub to pick them up off the East Coast. On New Years Eve, everything starts out as planned, but shortly after midnight, as the men are stealing a truck on Vivian Klein's Farm, Mary surprises them. Unwilling to harm Mary or jeopardize the escape, Schneider tells the men to leave without him. Without Schneider's language skills, they are captured trying to cross the Susquehanna Bridge, and Wagner is killed. Blaming Schneider for the failed escape, the men convene a Court of Honor to decide his fate.