The Sweetness of Life: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 1)

by PaulusHochgatterer (Author), JamieBulloch (Translator), PaulusHochgatterer (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2012

  $3.73

  It is Christmas in the alpine town of Furth am See and a six-year-old girl is playing ludo with her grandfather. The doorbell rings, and the old man goes to answer. The next time the girl sees him, he is lying with his skull broken, his face a red pulp against the white snow. From that time on, she does not speak a single word. Raffael Horn, the psychiatrist engaged to treat the silent child, reluctantly becomes involved in solving the murder along with Detective Superintendent Ludwig Kovacs. Their parallel researches sweep through the town: a young mother who believes her new-born child is the devil; a Benedictine monk who uses his iPod to drown the voices in his head; a high-spending teenager who tortures cats. The psychological profile of this claustrophobic, winter-held town is not reassuring - which, if any, of its inhabitants was the brutal night-time slayer of the suffering girl's grandfather?

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $5.86

  An old man has his skull broken on a winter's night. His seven-year-old granddaughter finds him and refuses to speak a single word afterwards. Raffael Horn, a psychologist engaged to treat the child, becomes reluctantly involved in solving the crime. Detective Superintendent Bruno Kovacs sits in snowbound beer gardens by day and peers through binoculars at night. Year-end crimes are always a bother, he finds, not least because they disrupt his erotic schedule with Marlene, the owner of a second-hand shop. And although he doesn't mind an excuse to extract himself from Marlene's romantic New Year plans, this victim, he is quite sure, will keep him busy well in to January.A psychopathic father beats his daughters, a jogging Benedictine monk hears voices that do not come from heaven, a retired postman contemplates suicide, and a young mother believes her new-born child is the devil...The psychological profile of this small town is far from reassuring - but which member of its population was the nocturnal visitor responsible for the brutal slaying?