France (Piranha), Italy (Del Vecchio)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Random House Audio)
What now? Women? Cigarettes? Whiskey? All the livelong day? Richard Ellwanger is at a complete loss as to how to occupy his time from now on, having quit his job as detective chief superintendent after he, Richard »the Third Degree« Ellwanger, Munich’s most successful interrogator, lost it while questioning a suspect.
Then suddenly he gets offered a case in far-off New York: a lady of means has been killed, and her sister and father are accusing her bereaved husband of not being who he says he is. They hire Ellwanger as a private detective. For him this means not only leaving his native Hohenlohe and entrusting his furry housemate Killmousky to the care of his neighbours. It also means adjusting to a big city where he doesn’t really speak the language or know the habits of the high society, and where one potential murderer lives who might be from Ellwanger’s hometown and whose personality increasingly becomes an object of fascination for the former detective.
With her usual linguistic virtuosity, Sibylle Lewitscharoff takes on a genre she, like millions of others, loves: Killmousky is a magnificent detective novel set in New York and rural Hohenlohe, both buried under mountains of snow. A reading pleasure of the highest order.
»In this city everything was in motion, and the winter twinkled and flashed like mad with its zillions of crystals.«
Things aren’t great with our flighty hero. Not even the clear night sky can entice him from his bed. The disappointment about the humiliation his »so-called friend« inflicted on him is too great.
Gloomy weeks skulk by until the phone rings one morning and a not entirely unlikable lady whom Pong has just met voices interest in the empty flat in his house. The background check comes...
Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s narrator is looking down onto his own grave, the bereaved friends and neighbours, onto the strange and the familiar in the city that is moaning under the oppressive heat...
Arabic world rights (Fawasel)
A highly dramatic scene: a father leans over the defenceless boy, the knife flashing in his hand – when, at the last moment, an angel orders him to sacrifice a ram instead of his own son. The...
Russia (Medina)
Renowned Dante scholars from all around the world meet in the ancient hall of Maltese at the Roman Aventine, within view of the St. Peter‘s Basilica. The center of interest is Dante’s Divine...
France (Piranha)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Audiobuch); German Entire Radio Reading (NDR)
English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Adriana Hidalgo), Chinese simplex rights (Shanghai Translation Publishing House), France (Les Belles Lettres), Italy (Del Vecchio Editore), Bulgaria (Atlantis), Slovenia (Sodobnost)
English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Hidalgo), Chinese simplex rights (Beijing Qingyan), Chinese complex rights (China Times Publishing), France (Piranha), Italy (Del Vecchio Editore), Hungary (Bookart), Bulgaria (Atlantis), Republic of Moldova / Romanian Rights (Cartier), Estonia (Atlex), Serbia (Presing Izdavastvo), Macedonia (Ars Lamina)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Book Club (Bertelsmann), German Audiobook (Der Hörverlag)