Pavel Kohout

The Widow Killer

Trans. Isabelle Hausser-Duclos
L'heure étoilée du meurtrier L'heure étoilée du meurtrier
L'heure étoilée du meurtrier
édition de Fallois, 2000
Language: French
Foreign rights:
Dilia
http://www.dilia.cz
Prose

Description from the English edition:

Set in the German-occupied city of Prague during the twilight of World War II, The Widow Killer is an extraordinary achievement by a literary artist of the first rank. The novel opens jarringly with the gruesome murder of the baroness of Pomerania, the widow of a German Wehrmacht general, by a perverted serial killer. The coroner’s report determines that the victim did not resist and was not raped. Mysteriously, her heart was removed and vanished with the killer. So begins this savage morality tale in which good and evil collide against a backdrop of political turmoil. The unlikely pair of Jan Morava, a rookie Czech detective, and Erwin Buback, a Gestapo agent who is questioning his loyalty to the Nazis, set out to track down the sadistic killer before he can strike again. But as Morava and Buback follow the killer’s bloody trail through Prague, it becomes clear that he is not a political radical or a wartime dissident but a tormented psychopath. In the downward spiral of the Third Reich’s final days, both officers must tirelessly search for a sinister murderer while grappling with their own emotional demons.

More information in French here.

L'heure étoilée du meurtrier
édition de Fallois, 2000
Language: French
Foreign rights:
Dilia
http://www.dilia.cz