Vlci z Hotvarenu (2026)

On All Souls’ Day in 2007, the owner of the mysterious Ore Mountains castle of Firteštejn and expert in occult sciences, Count Karel Eugen Rabendorf, dies. Several days after his death, the nearby village of Sedliště nad Ohří files a lawsuit questioning the legality of the castle’s restitution to the Rabendorf family in 1993. Filed almost fifteen years after the restitution itself, the lawsuit seems illogical, and its motives are surrounded by something controversially dark. Yet the absurd course of the restitution dispute in utterly corrupt courts suggests that the heirs may have to surrender their ancestral seat. This is unacceptable to their castle keeper, who decides to do symbolically what the estate’s former holders would have done. He hires people willing to occupy the castle in costume as armed soldiers from the Thirty Years’ War, drawing media attention to the case. By coincidence, however, he approaches a rather obscure historical fencing group whose swordsmen are overly fond of weapons and whose dancers are overly fond of witchcraft. They take the assignment so seriously and creatively that the castle keeper’s plan begins to slip out of his control, while events surrounding the strange restitution dispute take an utterly unpredictable turn for both sides of the legal battle and the forces behind it. This is another picaresque, or “humorously mischievous,” novel for readers who enjoy wandering beyond genre boundaries, because everything here is slightly different from what one might expect.