Georg Büchner, whimsical, poetry-writing Chief Inspector, investigates another mysterious death in this series of novels set in present-day Vienna. Anke Schulz, a woman in her thirties, is found dead in her bathtub in a house in the affluent suburb of Döbling on the northern edge of the city. Her across-the-hall neighbor, Eleanor Fabian, a sixty-six-year old British-American, has found herself a place to live there, far away from New York and her husband, Franz. As in the first volume in the series, "A Place to Die," Eleanor plays the sleuth, at first with enthusiasm, but with ever more trepidation: The atmosphere in the house darkens.
The inspector's investigations take him not only into less affluent immigrant districts of Vienna, but all the way to Berlin, as he looks into the dead woman's past in East Germany, and her involvement with immigrant populations in both cities. A stunningly attractive painter, her Egyptian lover, a Polish writer with an enigmatic past, a financier who commutes between New York and Vienna, Eleanor's hapless husband, Franz, who tries to come to her rescue but never quite knows what is going on--these are some of the characters who for three days of ceaseless searching keep the inspector guessing as he tries to answer the crucial questions: Who was Anke Schulz? Was she really murdered and if so, why? Two more people die in the process, and the lives of several others are changed forever, including, probably, Büchner's own.
