Mephisto Waltz

November 20, 2017
A prologue describing the assassination of Empress Elizabeth of Austria in Geneva in 1898 casts an ominous shadow over the events of Edgar-finalist Tallis’s gripping seventh mystery featuring psychiatrist Max Liebermann (after 2012’s Death and the Maiden). In Vienna in 1904, an unidentified male body is found in an abandoned piano factory, shot through the head and seated on a chair in front of three other chairs. Liebermann believes that the furniture’s deliberate arrangement indicates that the man’s execution was ordained by three people sitting in judgment, possibly for the violation of a secret society’s rules. The corpse’s webbed feet and scars lead to his identification as Angelo Callari, an Italian who recently arrived in the city, where he joined a society promoting international comity and the better treatment of the poor. Callari also has links to those who pose a threat to the Austrian throne. Series fans will be pleased to see Liebermann has a new love-interest, Amelia Lydgate, a former patient who injects some humor into the otherwise grim tale. Readers will hope they won’t have to wait another six years for Liebermann’s next outing. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates.

December 1, 2017
In turn-of-the-century Vienna, a police inspector and a progressive psychiatrist team up again to track a brilliant, homicidal anarchist.Six years after a mysterious man with a pointed beard surreptitiously murders the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898 Geneva, the Machiavellian Peter Nikolayevich Razumovsky devises an intricate but unspecified plan of destruction in Vienna. Could he have been the assassin in the prologue? Elsewhere, firebrand activists Eduard Autenberg and Axl Diamant are part of a cabal led by a shadowy figure known as Mephistopheles that plots anarchic acts of its own. DI Oskar Rheinhardt (Death and the Maiden, 2012, etc.) is first called in to investigate an unusual murder at a factory in nearby Favoriten, where the victim has been shot and disfigured with acid. Rheinhardt shares this and other oddities of the crime with his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a psychiatrist who's assisted him on many cases and spent many evenings with him as Rheinhardt sings classical pieces while Liebermann accompanies him on the piano. Meanwhile, Liebermann's deepening bond with emancipated Amelia Lydgate complicates his relationship with his parents and shakes his heretofore firm views on marriage. Distraught office clerk Lutz Globocnik confesses to the crime and identifies the victim but never seems entirely convincing. When he's proven wrong, Rheinhardt's called onto the carpet by his superiors. But Diamant's brutal murder makes Liebermann's insight invaluable in untangling the complex criminal web.Tallis' seventh period mystery is his most intricate and ambitious yet. A lengthy historical note is eye-opening and offers multiple avenues for further reading.

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