Lenya Fischer is the private eye equivalent of a pirate. She was in Stasi in the Eighties and never unlearned their ruthless ways.

Now she's 63 and hired to dig up dirt on Peter Brunner's Austrian lumber company Brunner Group. The client is his jealous cousin Ilsa.

Lenya needs her lover Orell Schneider's network since opaque Liechtenstein foundations own Brunner Group and hide its blackest secrets. Orell used to head up Liechtenstein's financial intelligence unit and did the same for Vatican City until he fled the Pope's trumped up charges against him. She brings him in, a car bomb kills him, and she comes home to find her house trashed and her cat hanging from a noose of piano wire. Everything is connected.

Now it's only justice for Orell or death as Lenya chases drug and gun money into Brunner Group, the Vatican Bank, and the pockets of a corrupt European establishment cornered like rats by the millions of protestors filling the streets. Globalization's upperworld criminals may just have picked the wrong fräulein to fool with.

Review from Kirkus Reviews:

In Nichols' debut crime novel, an aggrieved private eye takes on some of the most powerful interests in Europe.

Back in the 1980s, Lenya Fischer served as an intelligence officer for the Stasi, where her attributes—“sneaky, stealthy, a deep-diver”—earned her the nickname Der Narwhal. Now, after a stint in prison for bribery, the 63-year-old is back on the street working as one of Europe’s most tenacious corporate investigators for hire. Her current case has her looking into the activities of Peter Brunner, the scion of a lumber empire who seems to be hiding something in his Cyprus-, Malta-, and Liechtenstein-based shell companies. It won’t be an easy job: “The Brunners have been a kind of power behind the throne all across Europe since the Holy Roman Empire,” a friend warns her. “They didn’t stay on top through two world wars by being nice. They don’t like to be investigated.” Luckily, Lenya is one of the only people in the world with access to the perfect man to probe Brunner’s holdings: Orell Schneider, the so-called “007 of Money Laundering” (and Lenya’s ex-lover) whose past employers include Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit and the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority. When Orell is killed in a car bombing just days after Lenya tries to make contact, she knows she’s being sent a warning—if Orell’s death wasn’t clear enough, the killers also take the liberty of murdering Lenya’s cat, Fritz. Perhaps the Brunners don’t like to be investigated, but Lenya is not the sort of woman to back down once blood has been spilled. “Whoever did this was a ghost trying not to see the Grim Reaper,” she fumes. (“Lenya would hang on to the bottom of a car for a thousand miles to…watch the soul leave their eyes.”) Her investigation soon reconnects her with an East Texas spy she crossed swords with during the Lebanese Civil War, as well as a cavalcade of Russian mobsters, Corsican gun-runners, and other European ne’er-do-wells who stand between her and an international conspiracy the size of a continent.

In addition to the engaging revenge plot—which is more about avenging Fritz the cat than Orell—Nichols keeps his readers entertained with an endless supply of pseudonymous spies and criminal organizations. (For example: the Black Jackals, “founded by former Serbian special ops commandos who reinvented themselves as a gang of highly sophisticated international jewel thieves after the Balkans War in the Nineties.”) Lenya is a brilliant protagonist, a Russophile and true-believer who once reported her own husband for treason (he was executed) and who now finds herself doing the bidding of some of the world’s grossest capitalists. Nichols manages to pack the last 50 years of European conflict and interconnection into her personal history, illustrating how money and those who possess it circulate heedless of national borders. As the story unfolds, the vision of our tenuous global economy and democratic order that emerges is more terrifying than anything hidden in a Liechtenstein bank. Readers will undoubtedly look forward to Lenya’s next case.

A vast and immersive international crime thriller.

Review from BookLife by Publishers Weekly:

Nichols’s geopolitical thriller moves at breakneck speed, as nimble and relentless as protagonist Lenya Fischer, a tenacious Stasi agent turned private investigator. The 63-year-old Fischer was born just before the Berlin Wall went up and quickly rose through the ranks of the East German security apparatus, earning the nickname Der Narwhal because a female case officer was so rare. And like this “unicorn of the sea,” Fischer is pale, “sneaky, stealthy, a deep-diver,” and “very, very cold.” After the Wall fell, Fischer began using her network of contacts to aid corporate clients. Now, upon her recent release from prison—where she was sent for bribing a police officer—Fischer’s pulled into the struggle for control of the Brunner Group, a family-owned lumber empire in Austria that’s wielded political influence since the Holy Roman Empire.

Drawing on his intelligence career, Nichols’s debut has a lived-in authenticity, and he challenges readers to keep track of its sprawling conspiracy. Ownership of the Brunner Group is split between two cousins: Fischer’s client, Ilsa Brunner, who runs a straightforward business; and Peter Brunner, whose multinational operation is a labyrinth of shell companies. When Fischer reaches out to longtime espionage contact (and on-again-off-again lover) Orell Schneider—head of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority—for help, their digging triggers a deadly response, and Fischer quickly becomes enmeshed in a vicious criminal network of blackmailers and war profiteers.

Nichols deftly explores the relationship between religion and political power, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the rise of transnational networks that operate above the law. This wide-ranging inquiry is anchored by Fischer, who blends calculated machinations with an unwavering determination to reveal the truth, no matter the consequences. In Brunner in the Black, Nichols’s skeptical hero illustrates how political zeal can morph into personal morality—and why corruption is still susceptible to a dogged, old-school investigation.

Takeaway: Fast-paced global thriller tackles entrenched villainy with righteous indignation.

Review from Independent Book Review:

A gritty, globe-spanning thriller with brains, bite, and a heroine whose resolve to expose the truth threatens the world’s most powerful institutions.

If money is the root of all evil, Will Nichols’s debut, Brunner in the Black, proves the forest is thriving. In this high-tension and high-stakes thriller, Nichols exposes the machinery of global corruption with unnerving precision. What begins as a private investigation into a family-owned Austrian lumber empire quickly spirals into a far-reaching web of conspiracies that touches on one of Europe's oldest institutions and spreads across the Western world. Through this maze of offshore accounts, shell companies, and bloodstained secrets, Nichols builds a world that feels frighteningly plausible and presents a reflection of how power truly operates behind closed doors in today’s economic and political system.

"The power to shape world affairs requires secrecy and the ability to raise money in secret.”

At the center of this story is Lenya Fischer, a 63-year-old former East German Stasi agent turned investigator. Fresh out of prison for bribing a police chief, she takes on a job from Ilsa Brunner to dig up dirt on her cousin's illicit activities in the family business. Lenya reaches out to her longtime ally (and on-and-off lover) Orell Schneider for help. As they start to unravel Brunner Group’s opaque inner structure, it triggers a violent response that leaves both Orell and Fritz (Lenya’s beloved cat) gruesomely dead.

Now things are personal and Lenya wants vengeance just as much as she wants the truth exposed. Soon she uncovers evidence of embezzled state funds, money laundering, criminal proceeds, and Vatican-linked accounts that tie Europe’s most powerful figures. Each revelation pulls Lenya deeper into the core of a criminal network and conspiracy so vast it blurs the line between church and state, justice and survival. And as the circle tightens, the question remains: will Lenya be able to expose the truth to the world…or will she be buried alongside it?

Lenya’s not your typical heroine. Nicknamed “Der Narwhal”—a nod to her rarity as one of the first female case officers in East German Stasi intelligence—she’s a woman who commands respect in a field built for men. She’s not chasing redemption; she enforces her own kind of justice, and she’s terrifyingly good at it. I loved how Nichols doesn’t let her age soften her character. Loyal, brave, relentless, and dangerously smart, she navigates the chaos with the agility of someone half her age, or at least in their 40s.

Brunner in the Black details a complex, fast-paced plot that explores themes and topics such as systematic corruption, political manipulation, and the moral decay that festers beneath power. Drawing from his own years of experience as a career private investigator, Nichols feeds into the novel an authentic understanding of how power and influence moves, how religion is exploited for profit, and how information itself has become the most valuable, and dangerous, currency in today’s modern world.

“…knowledge is power. It is human nature to hoard power…The information handed out so easily to all of us by major news outlets isn’t knowledge, wisdom, or truth. Instead, it is a narrative those more powerful than us want us to believe to keep us less powerful.”

Brunner in the Black is bold, cerebral, and unapologetically political. It’s an intriguing exploration of the system we live under. And in Lenya Fischer, Nichols gives us a heroine sharp and brave enough to face it.

Readers who enjoy conspiracy theories and political thrillers will certainly find Brunner in the Black a strong contribution to the conversation.