Bitter Lemon Press

As you can tell from the blurb above, THE SINNER is a whydunnit, as opposed to a whodunnit book, although that's way too simplistic a description.  When Cora Bender stabs a man to death in front of family, friends, and a crowded park, nobody realises that she was originally planning to commit suicide.  Bender is obviously not in a good place in her life, despite outward appearances.  Rejected wholeheartedly by her husband immediately after the attack, it seems an open-and-shut case, which may only be mitigated by a plea of insanity.  Except that Rudolf Grovian senses something behind Frau Bender's acknowledgement of her guilt and maniacal desire to declare herself guilty with no reasons or explanations.

It's partially Grovian's investigation into Bender's childhood and family life, and partially his patient and careful questioning of her that slowly draws out the truth.  Bender's childhood is the stuff of nightmares - a desperately ill younger sister and a fanatical religious zealot of a mother who never hesitated to blame her first-born daughter for all of the younger sister's medical problems.  Add a caring but sexually frustrated and ineffectual father, who whilst never sexually abusing his daughter, confronted her with her parent's sexual problems, and everything has combined to create a girl who is guilty, conflicted, and profoundly disturbed.  Her closeness with her father creates a complex relationship with him, whilst he is kind and caring towards his daughter, his failure to take firm action in the face of her mother Elsbeth's more extreme behaviour makes him a weak figure, difficult to maintain respect, love and affection for.  Bender's ill sister, Magdalena, should have died many times in her childhood, somehow managing to cling to life, she is the centre of her mother's world, swamping everything and everyone with her requirements, draining the families financial as well as emotional resources, isolating them.  Eventually the two sisters seem to work out an understanding, a relationship, even love for each other, although, as with everything in this family, there's something not quite right.

Because of the way that Grovian goes about drawing out the story of Bender's background and therefore her reasons for violently killing a complete stranger, there's a lot of ground gone back over.  As she constantly lies about her past, Grovian is forced to look for the sprinklings of truth within the lies and slowly and steadily disprove the lies, forcing Bender back and back over the same ground, coaxing the truth from the ultimate in unreliable narrators.  Because of that narrative device, the pace is slow, emotional, repetitive and intricate.  The reader is given every opportunity to share Grovian's frustration, but at the same time you also get a feeling for Bender's distress, her desperation.  Whatever it is that she doesn't want known is held close, she's desperate to obfuscate, confuse, deny, avoid.  Particularly interesting was the way that Bender's family members, in particular, are characterised.  Seen, as they are, mostly from Bender's point of view, there's something misty about them, hesitantly revealing her father's ineffectiveness, her mother's madness, and her sister's memory.  It's particularly interesting that Magdalena is both transparent, weak, seemingly just about incapable of even basic communication; yet she's ultimately revealed as a much stronger personality, capable of manipulation, more able than originally contemplated.  Remembering that we were viewing Bender's family from her perspective, and the role that Magdalena's entire existence had such a profound affect on Bender - made it a particularly thought-provoking aspect.

THE SINNER isn't a straight-forward book.  Part thriller, a most unusual psychological study, it wasn't an easy book to read but it was an extremely thought-provoking, worthwhile book to read.

BLACK ICE is the first of German author Hans Werner Kettenbach's novels to be translated into English, and it's taken me from it's original publication date of 2005 to read it.  Which is good in one way as there appears to have been more books since then.  Which are now on my immediate buy list and I know that is probably going to sound very strange, as this isn't a particularly straightforward book.

Scholten, the long-time employee of Erica Wallman, isn't a pleasant man.  He's probably one of the most unpleasant characters I've encountered in crime fiction for quite a while.  And the book is told from his perspective so a lot of time is spent in the head of an unpleasant person.  Whilst his redeeming feature seems to be that he is the only person who doesn't believe that Erica's death was accidental and he is prepared to do what it takes to prove that, his overall demeanour makes you wonder if anybody would ever care what he thought.  But other people's opinions don't really matter to Scholten and he's absolutely obsessed with solving how Erica's husband killed his wife.  It's quite a puzzle too as it appears that she has simply slipped into the lake near her holiday villa - her husband nowhere nearby, the victim totally on her own at the time.  Yet Scholten painstakingly builds up a picture in his mind, and finds the pieces that he believes show that there was nothing accidental about the fall at all.

The tone that the book uses is very much set by Scholten's own voice.  Grumpy, self-opinionated, self-obsessed, unhappily married to a disapproving wife, dour and surly, the book proceeds in a low-key, dour styling as a result.  Having said that, there are some funny moments, as is there fragility and profound touches of melancholy.  These are people for whom life, as they made it, hasn't lived up to expectations.  But there's a single-minded purposefulness to everything that Scholten does that's claustrophobic, so personal to Scholten that the reader is left in a very uncomfortable position.  There's no clear "hero" to barrack for.  Just this unpleasant man who, aside from how much you dislike him, may, over and above everything else, just may have a point.

And then this man, this "hero", the one person that believes totally in justice for Erica Wallman gets distracted from the path of exposing the truth and ties himself up in a knot of catastrophic proportions.  And the reader is left.  Unable to decide whether a seriously unpleasant man has got exactly what he deserved.  Or a woman's fate has been unjustly served because her hero turns out to be no hero at all.  Either way - it's an extremely clever ending, full of meaning and immensely satisfying.  But a warning, it's not neatly tied up in a bow and delivered up on a plate.  Thankfully.