Vienna Secrets (Max Liebermann Series #4)

Great Historical Mystery

Another excellent effort in the Liebermann series. Great story woven with a wonderful historical perspective of turn of the century Vienna.

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Another good read by Frank Tallis

Frank Tallis knows how to spin a good mystery, and "Vienna Secrets," the fourth in the Max Lieberman series, is no exception. His characters are well drawn (especially the brilliant but arrogant Dr. Lieberman), but the appeal of this series is Tallis's ability to recreate the Vienna of the turn of the last century--a grand city with a profusion of artistic and scientific genius, but harboring the seeds of social decay and political disaster. He depicts the role of the upper-class Jewish community as it was--a community producing creative giants like Mahler, Freud and Klimt, but which nonetheless was hardly embraced by the Christian majority.

If there's a criticism of Tallis's writing, it's that he wears his erudition on his sleeve. Of course, as a psychologist, he's intimately familiar with the study of the mind, but his diversions into the technicalities of music and his frequent use of esoteric terms detract from the flow of the narrative. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to the next in the series.

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Liebermann at his Best!

Tallis's Max Liebermann series gets better with each outing. The characters are developed in a maturing way and you believe the real close bonds of The Odd Couple -the Jewish psychiatrist Liebermann and the Austrian detective Otto Reinhardt. The plot deals with medieval Jewish mystic belief and an apparent connection to turn-of-the-century Vienna in a credible and fascinating manner. To really enjoy this, you should read the three earlier ones first!

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A thoroughly Jewish murder mystery

You will enjoy reading Frank Tallin's new (2010) novel VIENNA SECRETS, if (1) you are fascinated by the dying Austro-Hungarian empire of Emperor Franz Joseph, (2) you like very long detective stories with abundant, well explained clues and (3) you are a student of Central European Jewry from the MIddle Ages till now. *****

The novel is noir, vivid, rich in detail. It is very, very Jewish. At times I had the impression that I was reading paeans to an ethnic group very much like Black History Month oratory. And I loved it. If you ever had doubts about Jewish contributions to Prague and Vienna, VIENNA SECRETS will erase them. *****

Franz Kafka is not a player when the novel's hero Maxim Liebermann, M.D., visits Prague. But a medieval Jewish rabbi he goes there to understand better, turns out to have contributed, through his creation from river mud of a creature called golem, to the solution of three horrid beheadings back in Liebermann's home city, Vienna. *****

Similarly by novel's end the reader sees that the contributions of Vienna to the world are unthinkable without grand Jewish names like Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler and Jewish contributions to medicine, theater, religious speculation and on and on. We listen to a lecture by Freud at his Jewish lodge. We meet Jews who have their own dueling society. *****

And we unravel the puzzle of the three beheadings with the help of a dozen major clues of which only one does not not require understanding of Jewish legends and beliefs. Fortunately, the English author provides all the Jewish background which non-Jewish readers need to understand when a clue is a clue.
-OOO-

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great historical police procedural

In 1903 Vienna, having collaborated before (see Vienna Blood) Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt asks his much older friend psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann to take a look at a gruesome corpse found on the grounds of Maria Treue Kirche. Max informs Oskar the victim a pianist monk Brother Stanislav had his head savagely ripped from his body. Before going on to the General Hospital to make his rounds, Max suggests Oskar interview strong men as well as the monks. Under questioning the monks insist Brother Stanislav was a good holy person until finally one breaks ranks and says the victim wrote anti-Semitic articles published in Vaterland.

Meanwhile two city council rivals Burke Faust and Julius Schmidt compete for favors from the mayor. Schmidt begins an anti-Jewish campaign using the homicide as justification. Rebbe Barash and his Kabala followers insist God's wrath descended on the monk which just enflames the city and encourages Schmidt. When Faust has his head torn off, the city reacts with anger and fear as anti-Semitism fever rises exponentially. While struggling with the case whose lone link is odd mud at the murder scenes, Max is in trouble at the hospital over Last Rites and Oskar dreams of dating a feminist.

Once again as in the Liebermann-Reinhardt previous collaborations (see A Death in Vienna and Fatal Lies), the time and place make for a great historical police procedural with the emphasis on the anti-Semitic atmosphere of 1903 Vienna. The murder inquiry is a terrific police procedural that will grip the audience wondering who and why. However, once again what makes Frank Tallis' latest tale and the entire series one of the best on the market is the sense of being in Vienna at the time of Freud.

Harriet Klausner

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