An enthralling Sherlock Holmes-esque mystery set in Vienna from one of Austria's most highly regarded authors
In the Viennese autumn of 1909, famed actor Eugen Bischoff is driven to suicide. All eyes are on Baron von Yosch, who was once the lover of the dead man's wife. The Baron has nothing to hide. But why was his pipe found at the scene of death? Could you prove your innocence, with your memory of events so confused? Then there was the girl on the phone who distinctly referred to 'the Day of Judgment' – the actor's dying words…
And there were other deaths that autumn, and it became harder to track down the invisible enemy – a monster who fed off intrigue, imagination and fear. The very things that drive us. The very things we cannot control.
Leo Perutz is the author of eleven novels that attracted the admiration of such writers as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges. He was born in Prague in 1882 and lived in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he fled to Palestine. He returned to Austria in the fifties and died in 1957. Perutz's Little Apple and St Peter's Snow will be published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2016.
