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by Petra Hammesfahr
Paperback Original. Nadia and Susanne look uncannily alike, but one of the women is seriously rich and the other is destitute. When Nadia asks Susanne to spend the weekend with her husband so that she can sneak off with a lover, how can Susanne refuse the outrageous payment on offer? Nadia and her husband barely speak to each other and he will be working most of the weekend. Easy money, or so it seems.
One Friday afternoon Susanne drives Nadia’s Alfa to her beautiful suburban villa with its indoor pool and glass doors opening onto the sloping lawn. This first stay is followed by others, as an apparently harmless game becomes a deadly web of lies.
"Starred Review. Full of clever and disturbing twists, this dark delight will please Patricia Highsmith fans. " - Publishers Weekly
"Petra Hammesfahr has written many novels, only one other of which has been translated into English (at time of writing this review). That novel, The Sinner, is a dark and excellent journey into the depths of the human soul; it is in a different league from The Lie and in my opinion a much better demonstration of this author's talents." - Eurocrime.co.uk
"Hammesfahr makes this story, preposterous in outline, work with great success, largely through the quality of her writing which, in Mike Mitchell's translation, tells a compelling tale." - The Independent (UK)
This information about The Lie was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Petra Hammesfahr, born in Germany in 1951, has not had an easy life: she left school at thirteen and became pregnant by an alcoholic husband at seventeen. She published her first novel when she was forty and has since written over twenty crime and suspense novels. Petra also writes scripts for television and film. She has won numerous literary prizes, including the Crime Prize of Wiesbaden and the Rhineland Literary Prize.
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