A gripping, suspenseful and terrifying murder mystery.

Crime/Detective, Literary fiction, Thriller  |  English sample translation available

Karlovy Vary, better known abroad as Carlsbad, is a beautiful and somewhat sleepy real spa in western Bohemia, located on a river flowing through a picturesque valley. Something nasty, however, happened a couple of months ago and now it has occurred again: a visitor to the town has been viciously bitten by another tourist who committed suicide shortly afterwards. Both cases are similar, but neither the perpetrators nor the victims had anything to do with each other, they were complete strangers. A sense of terror looms over the cool colonnades and hot springs as guests begin to cancel their reservations, threatening to bankrupt the whole town. The deputy commander of the city police writes to Julian Uridil, his former friend from school, now a famous mystery writer living in Prague, and begs him to come back to his hometown and help solve the crimes that are so similar to those in his books. Julian arrives in Karlovy Vary and discovers a detail the police overlooked: at each crime scene somebody has left a photograph of a seemingly dead girl covered with false tattoos…

Miloš Urban (1967), one of the most translated Czech writers has published a total of 15 books: novels, novellas and short stories. The novels Hastrman (Water-Goblin, 2001) and Santiniho jazyk (Santini’s Language, 2005) have been made into films, and Water-Goblin won the top Czech literary award Magnesia Litera (2012). The novel Sedmikostelí (The Seven Churches, 1998), written in the spirit of Gothic novels and tales of terror, full of melancholy and murder in the middle of old Prague, has sold tens of thousands of copies and was translated into 20 languages. Almost every year Urban publishes a new novel on a variety of themes, which underlines his wide scope of interest. He combines suspense with literary quality.