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Published Feb 2010
400 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. Tallis's excellent fourth puzzler set in early 20th-century Vienna (after 2008's Fatal Lies) neatly blends mystery and history." - Publishers Weekly
"As in Tallis's earlier works, the murder mystery is almost second to larger themes involving dreams, architecture, music, racial politics, and even pastries in a Vienna that we realize is soon to break apart." - Library Journal
"The precision and economy of his intelligent prose keep his story in balance and tension high." - Kirkus Reviews
"The historical details of police work and forensic investigation again are a strong point, and with this book’s inclusion of a trip to Prague, readers are introduced to another fascinating city...A solid entry in an excellent historical mystery series." - Booklist
"A strong, intelligent plot and a terrific atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna." - The Times, London
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dr. Frank Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist. He has held lecturing
posts in clinical psychology and neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry and
King's College, London.
He has written self help manuals (How to Stop Worrying, Understanding
Obsessions and Compulsions) non-fiction for the general reader (Changing
Minds, Hidden Minds, Love Sick), academic text books and over
thirty academic papers in international journals.
Dr. Tallis' novels are: The Forbidden, The Sleep Room, Killing Time, Sensing Others, Mortal
Mischief (published in the USA as A Death in Vienna), Vienna Blood,
Fatal Lies and Darkness Rising. The last four form the first four
volumes of the Liebermann Papers series.
In 1999 he received a Writers' Award from the Arts Council of ...
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