Last Respects

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