Tabor Süden 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.
Süden plans to leave Munich with no goodbyes. However, when his boss catches him at the railway station, she persuades him to take on one final case: and a highly unusual commission it is. Perhaps Süden...
Tabor Süden 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.
Süden plans to leave Munich with no goodbyes. However, when his boss catches him at the railway station, she persuades him to take on one final case: and a highly unusual commission it is. Perhaps Süden only agrees because one thing is clear: if he finds the missing man, he will be meeting his mirror image. The man who has disappeared is a writer of crime novels, something of a celebrity once. And he has vanished with no farewell. Whereabouts: naturally unknown.
In his dark new novel, Friedrich Ani has the life experiences of the detective and the writer running parallel: both are trying to swindle death and vanquish darkness awhile. Will it happen, this encounter between missing person and missing-persons’ sleuth, two men lost to the world?
Tabor Süden’s 21st case. The first 20 have been published in a previous series.
»Through the understated use of religious motives Ani manages to light a few humane candles in this dark world of the soul and in so doing wins the reader over to the side of his two detached men-of-pain who have forgotten how to smile.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»A touching, sad, and rather beautifully written novel.« stern
»With his novels that grab the reader not by means of inflated action but through subtle psychological portraits and a painfully warm melancholy, Ani is one of the giants of the whole genre of contemporary crime fiction. His latest Tabor-Süden novel is once again proof and a sad and beautiful companion for the autumn-blues.« Nürnberger Nachrichten
»Friedrich Ani’s novel The Fool and His Machine pushes the envelope of the crime novel in an uncompromising and masterly way.« General Anzeiger Bonn
»With The Fool and His Machine Friedrich Ani has once again written a complex psycho-thriller with a highly unconventional approach.« Rhein Neckar Zeitung
»Süden has accompanied Ani and us since 1998 in over 20 novels. It would be nice for it to keep going a little while longer.« literaturkritik.de
»A book like the last rays of sun before autumn’s first frosts.« Nürnberger Zeitung
»This novel boasts all the classical features for which Friedrich Ani is known. And the quirky Tabor Süden is the ideal protagonist for this story. The decision to use him again was without a doubt the right one.« volksstimme.de
»Friedrich Ani writes with clockwork precision, in his unique, unconventional tone, sleek and sharp and still rich in atmosphere.« Frankfurter Rundschau
»Ani shows that beautiful prose, poetry, smashing mastery of dialogues, wisdom, accuracy devoted to the [description of the] present and the format of the crisp short crime novel aren’t mutually exclusive, and that there can be a legitimate successor of Dürrenmatt in this field.« Die Welt
»Through the understated use of religious motives Ani manages to light a few humane candles in this dark world of the soul and in so doing wins the reader over to the side of his two detached men-of-pain who have forgotten how to smile.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»A touching, sad, and rather beautifully written novel.« stern
»With his novels that grab the reader not by means of inflated action but through subtle psychological portraits and a...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
English world rights (Seagull), Italy (Emons)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Radio Drama (Deutschlandfunk Kultur)
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...
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...
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg)
English world rights (Seagull), Italy (Emons), Greece (Gutenberg)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Entire Radio Readings (HR and BR)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Plataforma)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Plataforma)