Frank Tallis does a very difficult thing in his books A DEATH IN VIENNA, VIENNA BLOOD and this, the third in his LIBERMANN PAPERS series, FATAL LIES. He evokes an era and locale largely unfamiliar to American readers, and introduces us to the setting slowly, smoothly and very successfully. We are in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Austria, in the heyday of Freudian psychology. Dr. Max Liebermann, who is an acolyte of Freud, is occasionally drawn into the Austrian security system apparatus by his friend, Det. Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, and it is through these two august individuals that the tale is told.
In this book, a young boy is found dead, seemingly of natural causes, at the laboratory bench in a military school. There are no immediately obvious wounds, but also no sign of congenital heart failure or the like. Something doesn’t feel right to Rheinhardt, and he turns to Liebermann for help. They discover an emotionally tangled web of deceit, a labyrinth of little white lies that when woven together turn out to be deadly.
Psychiatric tricks in mysteries generally tend to leave me cold, but the panache with which the author endows Liebermann makes him a bit more Sherlockian than the average inner-city shrink, and there is some serious deductive work taking place as well. Rheinhardt is a good solid cop — one who stands up for what is right even in the face of a casually brutal bureaucracy — and the interaction of the two (again, very Sherlockian) is what allows the story to hold together.
Classical music, European food, early psychiatry, the gaudy and glorious charms of the fin de siècle era — all imbue Tallis’ works and give the reader a rich and fruitful experience not found in other mysteries. Definitely worth a try. —Mark Rose
Related posts:
- Beautiful Lies
- Empire of Lies
- FRAMES O’ REFERENCE >> The Printed Page Lies at 24 Words a Second
- The Art of Detection
- The Intruders
