Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, is publishing a new review of Vienna Secrets by Frank Tallis. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
Vienna Secrets by Frank Tallis
A Max Liebermann Mystery
Random House (Trade Paperback)
ISBN-10: 0-8129-8099-9 (0812980999)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8129-8099-8 (9780812980998)
Publication Date: February 2010
List Price: $15.00
Review: Psychologist Max Liebermann is called upon to assist in the investigation of the brutal murder of a monk in Vienna Secrets, the fourth mystery in this series by Frank Tallis.
Brother Stanislav of the Piarist Order is found decapitated, his head seemingly twisted from his body. Detective Oskar Rheinhardt can hardly believe a single man could have had the strength to do such a thing. Even two men. But soon thereafter another body is found, a Catholic priest, killed in the same manner. Both men had been outspoken critics of Jews, likening them to a plague in the city. With their bodies found adjacent to a Plague Column, erected throughout the city to celebrate the end of the epidemic plague in the 17th century, the symbolism couldn't be more obvious. Are their murders the work of a Jewish sect out for revenge?
This supposition is quickly proved invalid, or at least unlikely, when the body of a rabbi is found, his head also placed near a plague column. Maybe someone is trying to start a religious war in Vienna, striving to get each side to blame the other -- but to what end? Some, however, think it is the work of the devil himself. Liebermann and Rheinhardt follow leads from one end of Vienna to the other in an attempt to solve these gruesome crimes.
Vienna Secrets takes place in 1903 at a time when dissention between Christians and Jews was very real in Vienna. The historical aspect to the story together with detailed descriptions of the cultural life in the city at that time lend a credible backdrop to the murder mystery, so much so that it's hard to separate fact from fiction. Max Liebermann is an interesting, conflicted character: a non-practicing Jew but also a physician, trained to heal the physically ailing, but now practicing the study of the mind. This solidly plotted historical mystery is a strong entry in this series.
Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of Vienna Secrets and to Random House for providing a copy of the book for this review.
Review Copyright © 2010 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
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Synopsis (from the publisher): In Freud’s dangerous, dazzling Vienna of 1903, an ingenious doctor and an intrepid detective again challenge psychotic criminals across a landscape teetering between the sophisticated and the savage, the thrilling future and the primitive past.
On opposite sides of the city, two men are found beheaded on church grounds. Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt is baffled. Could the killer be mentally ill, someone the victims came into contact with? Some are even blaming the murders on the devil. But when psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann learns that both victims were vocal members of a shadowy anti-Semitic group, he turns his gaze to the city’s close-knit Hasidic community. The doctor is drawn into an urban underworld that hosts and hides virulent racists on one side and followers of kabbalah on the other. And as the evidence—and bodies—pile up, Liebermann must reconsider his own path, the one that led him away from the miraculous and toward a life of the mind.
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