From book jacket: The Amber Room was one of mankind's greatest treasures, a masterpiece of staggering ambition and value. Commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701 ... [it was] sent in 1717 as a gift to Peter the Great. ... A symbol of Russia's glory, it remained in the village of Tsarskoye Selo for almost 200 years. When the Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 ... its panels were wrenched from the walls, packed into crates, and taken to Konigsberg on the Baltic coast. ... The Amber Room has never been seen since. In the last 60 years, hundreds of people have spent tens of millions of dollars tracing the whereabouts of the Amber Room. ... In a masterpiece of detection [the authors] have at last unraveled the jumble of evidence surrounding its fate. ... A gripping climax ... shows incontrovertibly what happened to the most valuable lost treasure in the world and why the truth has been withheld for so long. Its conclusions recolor our understanding of the Cold War and its aftermath.