This was a 4 ½ rounded down to a 4 because I thought the flow was at times disjointed, but that in no way detracts from my admiration for this author and the work and heart that she put into this book. I also found the ending to be somewhat abrupt.It has been about a week since I finished reading this book and I’m still having problems summarizing the novel. I have read many, many books about WWII and all of Hitler’s atrocities but have never heard the name of the Ernst Shafer. He was a hunter, collector and zoologist specializing in ornithology.As the novel begins we are introduced to Ernst and his childhood friend and then wife Herta, who, throughout the novel notices how much Ernst changes. When they were young they would often go on adventures in nature and he would show her bird’s feathers and pointed out various animals and vegetation. As he got older he became obsessed with his hunting and collecting. “Why can’t you just be proud of me, Herta?” “ Proud of what exactly? She brushed him off. I can’t admire the violent deaths of your precious birds”.Ernst is already well known when Heinrich Himmler appoints him to head up an expedition to Tibet. He is convinced that it is here that they will find a link to the pure Aryan race that the Germans are convinced are above all other humans. Ernst is more interested in all of the “specimens” that he will be able to collect on this long, extensive expedition, he doesn’t really care why it is being funded. Throughout the novel we don’t really hear about what is being learned about the Aryan race’s origins, but only about what Ernst is hunting and collecting.The group does manage to gain entry into Tibet and it is around this time that the world is erupting into WWII. Their extended trip is cut short and they are lucky to return to Germany and avoid capture by the Allies, and with all of their “specimens” intact.I found some of the story confusing as we are hearing the story from both Herta and Ernst’s POV’s. At time we also jump back and forth in time.There is a third POV and that is from a juvenile panda whom Ernst had shot and brought back as a trophy for the museum. It was this story, although fictitious and somewhat dreamlike, that added even more sadness to an already emotionally highly charged story. “Some days my mind wanders back to Wild, to the mists of the forest with it’s gnarled, moss covered tree roots . . . the smell of freshly cut bamboo and the singing of distant villagers who knew well enough to leave us alone.” “My mother would tell me stories when I was a cub of when our ancestors lived high up in the mountains”. Panda’s story added another dimension to the novel, I began to wonder at what price to nature do we fill our museums with specimens from the wild? It was definitely thought provoking.There is a lot of information in this book, well researched and ending with an Afterword which describes what happened to many of the SS officers noted in the novel. “After his return to Germany from Tibet, Himmler sent Ernst to film medical experiments on inmates at Dachau concentration camp”. Upon his internment in Nuremberg he managed to convince his interrogators that he was manipulated by Himmler and was working only as a scientist. He was fined but then released to serve as curator of the Department of Natural History from 1960 to 1970, he lived to age 82 in Germany. It was incredibly disturbing, infuriating really, to read about the number of Nazi’s who had committed terrible crimes who went unpunished, able to live out their lives after they had taken the lives of so many others.I felt fortunate to be able to read this novel and know that I will be thinking about the messages being told here for a long while. I highly recommend this to all lovers of historical fiction.