Kim Hays' second novel serves us a suspicious drowning, ugly secrets,
and unresolved romantic tension . . .
Walking his dog along Bern's Aare river on an icy November night, a
surgeon in his seventies is hit in the face and thrown into the river to
drown. When his bruised corpse is found, his watch is missing. A mugging
gone wrong? The more Swiss police detective Giuliana Linder and her
assistant Renzo Donatelli learn about Johann Karl Gurtner, the more
convinced they are that his death was not random.
Talking to Gurtner's family raises as many questions as it answers, but
one thing becomes clear: the surgeon's relationship with his middle son,
Markus, was grim. Tracking others who might have had reason to hate
Gurtner, Giuliana and Renzo find themselves once again dealing with
their attraction to one another and their ambivalence about having an
affair.
Behind their investigation, another story has been unfolding. During the
year leading up to Gurtner's death, his son Markus became friends with a
former classmate of his father's from the village where the two men grew
up. Unlike the privileged young Gurtner, Jakob Amsler was forcibly
removed from his mother at nine and contracted to live and work on a
village farm. From Jakob, Markus learns that his father's early life
contains some very odd secrets--secrets that Giuliana and Renzo are now
trying to uncover.
