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Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town on the border between Europe and the East, the worldly, corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the Empire. When a member of his own family is murdered the Count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jacob Tausk, a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends even beyond the province. In the wake of new terrorist attacks, a mysterious preacher appears – one of the so-called wonder rabbis from the shtetls of the East – trailing a band of fanatical disciples who proclaim him the Messiah. Soon Tausk finds himself serving two masters: the Count and the richest man in the province, Moritz Rotenburg, whose only son has returned from his studies burning for revolution, ready to gather disciples of his own. Compelling and brilliantly imagined, Conspirators evokes the thousand-year-old Habsburg empire on the edge of collapse and conjures the erotic, mystical, political and apocalyptic passions of the age.