Self's Murder

June 15, 2009
The successful film adaptation of Schlink's The Reader
should give a boost to his third mystery to feature aging German PI Gerhard Self (after 2007's Self's Deception
). On his way home to Mannheim during a snow storm, Schlink helps a stranded driver, Bertram Welker, who on learning Self's profession offers him a job. A partner in the region's oldest private bank, Welker is writing its history and asks Self to identify a silent partner in the bank. What appears to be a straightforward assignment becomes a double murder inquiry once Self comes to doubt Welker's account of how his wife perished in a hiking accident the year before and the bank's unofficial archivist dies in a suspicious car crash after handing Self a briefcase full of money. Crisp prose and some well-handled plot complications, which include the emergence of a man claiming to be Self's son, will keep readers turning the pages.

July 1, 2009
A chance encounter in 1993 brings aging investigator Gerhard Self (Self's Deception, 2007, etc.) one last case with enough twists and turns for a whole career.

Bertram Welker's history of Weller& Welker, his family's private bank, won't be complete without an account of the silent partner who pumped an undisclosed amount of cash into the firm a century ago. Since Welker's never identified this savior, he wants Self, the man who pushed his car out of a snowy ditch, to find out who he was. The logical person to help Self is retired schoolteacher Adolf Schuler, the bank archivist whom Welker and his go-to guy Gregor Samarin somehow forgot to mention. But although Schuler can't identify the silent partner, he presents Self with something else—an attach case filled with banknotes—moments before he drives his car into a tree. Clearly there's more going on at Weller& Welker than a search into the family archives: a criminal conspiracy that involves fraud, deception, money laundering, kidnapping, murder and a descent into Third Reich history that becomes a lot more personal than is comfortable for Self, whose career as a public prosecutor ended ignominiously. His uneasy feeling about the case is complicated further when ex-Stasi officer Karl-Heinz Ulbrich turns up on his doorstep insisting that he is Self's son.

Schlink (Homecoming, 2008, etc.) constructs a series of Chinese boxes whose increasingly untidy carpentry—the case ends with the appealingly reflective hero far more bewildered than he began—is exactly his point.

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