Miloš Urban

Carlsbad

Kar Kar
Kar
Argo, 2019, 350 pp

“Urban’s novel KAR is again very readable; the protagonist becomes the reader’s guide in the present as well as past Karlovy Vary. Famous people connected with this town – especially Goethe, who becomes a certain symbol of late love in this book – enter the text in short remarks.”
— Vaše literatura

A gripping, suspenseful and terrifying murder mystery.

Crime/Detective, Literary fiction, Thriller

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…


“Urban’s novel KAR is again very readable; the protagonist becomes the reader’s guide in the present as well as past Karlovy Vary. Famous people connected with this town – especially Goethe, who becomes a certain symbol of late love in this book – enter the text in short remarks.”
— Vaše literatura

Kar
Argo, 2019, 350 pp