When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man dumped in a cornfield. It is a discovery that throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design which sparked the construction of the computer as we know it the development of nuclear weapons the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in war-time Vienna ove ...