Name: Vienna Twilight
ISBN: 9780812981001

Frank Tallis

While hunting for a serial murderer who has been targeting prostitutes in Vienna, Detective Oskar Reinhardt and young psychoanalyst Max Liebermann receive a tip from a patient who relays disturbing dreams.

Vienna Twilight

Emmett

A mystery novel that offers much more than its key mystery, which is the kind of thrill I love the most. Tallis goes beyond the elaborate whodunit to catch the reader up in the sweep of Viennese culture in the time when Freud was writing. Having a psychoanalyst (who is not Freud, thankfully) and a detective, two persons with moral and intellectual strengths and interests, put their heads together to solve murders was an excellent opportunity put into good use. Reinhardt and Dr Liebermann discuss the 'latest' developments in psychology and criminology, and occasionally take the time to make music together. Someone who knows their classical music and musical theory will appreciate, more than I do, their delight and the frequent mentions to symphonies and their composers and the like. However, there is an unmistakable strength of writing that this lover of order senses despite being less than a beginner in these things. Music is precise, emotional, luxurious, taut yet generous; and there is a feeling of this in the stream of Tallis' writing.

The 'main' incident wasn't as interesting as I liked it to be. It plays up what I see as a frequent habit of making serial murderers sensationally different, half-mad priests of mystical-religious delusions who are as comfortingly 'weird' as we are comfortingly normal and rational and repulsed by what they are. (Or perhaps I'm an inundated reader of murder-thrillers which so readily offer versions of depravity and darkness. I'm reminded of Keith Ablow's The Architect.) However, the care of laying out the mystery and the process of his capture made reading satisfying and I enjoyed every moment of that. This was intelligent and worthwhile and I would read another from the series.