December, 1944: the height of the German counteroffensive in the Belgian Ardennes. A panicked priest entrusts Renée, a 7-year-old Jewish girl, to two American GIs who are actually undercover SS agents out to disrupt Allied Forces. They're about to execute the girl, but just as Mathias is about to pull the trigger, something in the girl's eyes troubles him, and he turns his gun on his fellow Nazi instead. On the run, the unlikely duo will see the worst, and sometimes the best, that humanity has to offer when its own survival is threatened.
In this pulse-pounding novel, with its terse, lucid style, there is no black and white. War stories are written in shades of gray with splotches of blood.