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June 30, 2014
Drvenkar’s second novel (after 2011’s Sorry) opens with a man known as “The Traveler” using a 1995 snowstorm to screen to murder 26 solitary drivers stalled on a German highway in 1995. This chilling account is rendered in the second person, as is the rest of the novel. The complex plot is confusing at first, but the primary story line involves Ragnar Desche, a ruthless career criminal, who is looking to recover drugs valued at about three million euros. He has already killed his brother, Oskar, who was holding the contraband for him in Berlin—his teenage niece, Taja, eventually implicated in the crime. With the help of her “blood sisters”—Stink, Nessi, Schnappi, and Ruth—Taja tries to sell the drugs so she can find her mother in Norway. But what they find instead is Ragnar and his crew, on their tails in a violent and disturbing chase. Readers might question the narrative strategy of the second person voice, and they might wonder about how the various plotlines coalesce, but Drvenkar smartly ties everything up by the story’s end.

June 15, 2014

The relatively innocent lives of a group of teenage German girls will take a pronounced turn for the worse when one of their number needs help. Taja Desche, overdosing on a near-lethal cocktail of drugs after killing her father, Oskar, is somehow able to text friends Nessi, Ruth, Schnappi, and Stink for help. After Stink offers to sell five kilos of what turns out to be pure heroin found at the house to Oskar's nephew Darian, son of Ragnar Desche, a ruthless Berlin crime boss (whose goods these are in the first place), all hell breaks loose. Ragnar, Darian, and Ragnar's henchman pursue the girls from Berlin to Hamburg and finally to the shuttered family hotel in Norway for a climactic confrontation. Set against this narrative is the story of the Traveler, a mysterious and elusive serial killer responsible for a number of heinous crimes. VERDICT Told completely in the second person, with chapters alternating between differing characters' perspectives on the same events, this work is a dark thriller with an extremely high body count. While the novel's occasionally repugnant and often grisly action might seem designed to turn away the reader, Drvenkar accomplishes the rare feat of making this a gripping page-turner.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

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