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Last Respects

Novel
Suhrkamp | Insel

Last Respects / Letzte Ehre
Novel
No one said anything, no one saw anything

Seventeen-year-old Finja Madsen fails to come home after a party one night. There are no witnesses, no clues as to what happened to her. The investigation is at a dead end. Inspector Fariza Nasri interviews family and friends of the missing girl, including her mother’s boyfriend Stephan Barig. The party was at his house while he spent the weekend in the countryside with two friends. Barig diligently cooperates. Nasri listens, asks questions – and is suddenly certain that the man is lying....

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Seventeen-year-old Finja Madsen fails to come home after a party one night. There are no witnesses, no clues as to what happened to her. The investigation is at a dead end. Inspector Fariza Nasri interviews family and friends of the missing girl, including her mother’s boyfriend Stephan Barig. The party was at his house while he spent the weekend in the countryside with two friends. Barig diligently cooperates. Nasri listens, asks questions – and is suddenly certain that the man is lying. But was he really involved in Finja’s disappearance or is he hiding something else entirely?


The search for a missing girl slowly becomes a nightmarish journey into the abysses of male fantasies of power and the devastation they leave behind. Fariza Nasri gets caught up in a maelstrom of violence that keeps her in its grip until she nearly drowns. A gripping, painful and dark novel.

»Friedrich Ani writes with clockwork precision, in his unique, unconventional tone, sleek and sharp and still rich in atmosphere. [... He] needs but two words for us to believe that we’re not just feeling a certain kind of weather but the book’s atmosphere on our skin« Sylvia Staude, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Certain details and milieus can only be found in Ani’s books, books in which it is not the plot, but the detours and side routes that are important.« Peter Körte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»There once was an initiative to ban violence against women in crime novels. Had it been successful, Friedrich Ani’s new novel would never have been published. Which would have been unfortunate from a literary and dangerous from a social point of view.« Elmar Krekeler, Welt am Sonntag

»Friedrich Ani's masterful crime novel Last Respects deals with what men do to women as a matter of course.« Sylvia Staude, NZZ am Sonntag

»Ani stages [dialogues] brilliantly, because he doesn’t bank on dramatic effects but on a calm, unstoppable unmasking of the self.« Simone Dattenberger, Münchner Merkur

»In Last Respects ... a hard-boiled plot meets empathetically written characters, psychologically subtly constructed dialogues and a literarily elevated language that never escapes Friedrich Ani's control, even though, as a male author, he has taken the risk of adopting a female narrative voice.« Jan Drees, Deutschlandfunk

»Dark and sad and incredibly gripping.« Die Presse

»Friedrich Ani writes with clockwork precision, in his unique, unconventional tone, sleek and sharp and still rich in atmosphere. [... He] needs but two words for us to believe that we’re not just feeling a certain kind of weather but the book’s atmosphere on our skin« Sylvia Staude, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Certain details and milieus can only be found in Ani’s books, books in which it is not the plot, but the detours and side routes that are important.« Peter Körte,...

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2021, 270 pages
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Persons

Friedrich Ani was born in 1959. His first novel was published in 1996, and since then he has gone on to write crime novels, poetry and YA-fiction, as well as writing for TV, radio and theatre. He is an award-winning script writer, while his books have also received many prominent awards. So far, he is the only author ever to receive the German Crime Fiction Prize for three titles in the same year (2003).

Friedrich Ani was born in 1959. His first novel was published in 1996, and since then he has gone on to write crime novels, poetry and YA-fiction,...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Light Years in the Dark
Year of Publication: 2024
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2024
A shopkeeper who had big plans for the future has disappeared. His wife thinks her dreams are over. Then there’s the former owner of a removals business with a guilt complex, and a mysterious visitor from the Berlin demimonde. The fates of all these characters intersect in Munich, in a turn of events that causes all their lives to go off the rails.

Leo Ahorn has disappeared. And yet,...
Pen
Year of Publication: 2024
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2024

A narrator, possibly a former monk, looks back on his life: there wasn’t any real space for childhood and youth in it, his father and mother did not play the role intended for them. His path led him from faith to doubt, from the village to the city. He escaped the city into the solitude of his hermitage, where he tries to put into words what leaves him bewildered, investigates the...

Bull’s Eye
Year of Publication: 2022
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2022

Police officer Kay Oleander was hit in the face with a beer bottle during a demonstration and lost his left eye as a result. Released from active duty, he struggles to get through the day – until fate leads him to Silvia Glaser. She, too, has been disabled ever since a bicycle accident. Unexpectedly, the two find support in each other – despite the fact that she is suspected of...

All the Empty Rooms
Year of Publication: 2019
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2019

In Friedrich Ani’s new novel, »the four« must spring into action: Polonius Fischer (the former monk), Tabor Süden (the returned missing person’s investigator), Jakob Franck (the former inspector, now retired, but still the deliverer of the worst news) and Fariza Nasri (the detective with Syrian roots, saved from her banishment to the provinces). All of them must...

The Fool and His Machine
Year of Publication: 2018
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2018

Tabor SĂĽden started out as a policeman before moving into private detective work, becoming an experienced specialist in missing persons cases. What he really wanted was to walk away forever from investigative work after the last case in which one of his colleagues lost his life.


SĂĽden plans to leave Munich with no goodbyes. However, when his boss catches him at the railway station,...

Killing Happiness
Year of Publication: 2017
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2017

Happiness is extinguished completely when 11-year-old Lennard Grabbe doesn’t come home one night during the cold November days in Munich. 34 days later, he is found the victim of a murderer....

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Italy (Emons)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Radio Drama (Deutschlandfunk Kultur)

In My Father's Room
Year of Publication: 2017
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2017

Poetry owes many evergreens to »occasional poems«. In the case of Friedrich Ani, such poems constitute deliberate addressing, musically worded compositions if one considers current political-individual situations the occasion to which one must react immediately, showing oneself and the counterpart in all its vulnerability. These realistic-spontaneous sounds find very different forms: from the...

Naked Man Burning
Year of Publication: 2016
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2016

At the age of fourteen, a boy flees from the southern German village of Heiligsheim. Forty years later, he returns under the name of Ludwig »Luggi« Dragomir. The tough times he has had to...

Rights sold to:

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg)

The Nameless Day
Year of Publication: 2015
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2015
Detective Chief Superintendent Jakob Franck has been retired for two months and feels that he can now start to lead a life in which he leaves behind the dead - until a case from his past...
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Italy (Emons), Greece (Gutenberg)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Entire Radio Readings (HR and BR)

The Air Guitarist
Year of Publication: 2003
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2003
At the city’s vey first Air Guitar Championships, Süden’s colleague Martin Heuer comes second in the preliminary round – when suddenly his toughest competitor disappears without a trace. Together with Süden and the team from Department 11, Heuer sets out on a search: they find a suicide note and a woman who is deaf and understands everything, but doesn’t want to...
The Queen’s Secret
Year of Publication: 2002
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2002
When investigation the death of a man who starved to death in a seemingly deserted house, the CID comes across the name of a woman: Soraya Roos. This brings Inspector Tabor Süden to the scene, the expert for missing persons, because ten years ago Soraya left her family from one day to the next and has been considered missing ever since. Süden starts searching for her once more and...
The Woman with the Austere Dress
Year of Publication: 2002
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2002
Johann Farak, 41, son of an Egyptian, has disappeared. But apart from his sister, no one seems to miss him. He was a drunkard, they say, he painted pictures on wooden boards that were no good. Then a mysterious young woman turns up – and Inspector Tabor Süden suddenly realises what a sad life Johann Farak has led so far and that perhaps he had no choice but to leave this life behind ...
The Streetcar Drinker
Year of Publication: 2002
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2002
Tabor Süden is on leave, reducing accrued overtime and doing little else but letting himself drift along the streets of Munich. But then he is unexpectedly called to Department 11: A man is...
Rights sold to:

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Plataforma)

The Promise of the Fallen Angel
Year of Publication: 2001
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2001
Maximilian Grauke has left his wife without explanation. A shoemaker who wants to leave his monotonous life behind – or so it seems. But this is not the first time Grauke has disappeared. And...
Rights sold to:

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Plataforma)