Cozy domestic scenes, interspersed throughout the book, are to be enjoyed, because the rest is brutal: the story of Blum’s childhood, that of the refugees, the revenge killings, the graphic and grisly dismembering of the corpses. This thread adds the hunter is being hunted frisson to proceedings, because the police don’t have a clue that a serial killer is at large.Īnd yet Blum is a loving mother, a caring daughter-in-law and a genuinely grief-stricken wife. Her biggest problem is the father of the photographer, who suspects something malign has happened to his boy when he disappears without trace. Nor is dispatching her prey, once located. She has the guts, the knowledge, and the wherewithall.Īn undertaker, there’s not much Blum doesn’t know about body disposal, so hiding the evidence isn’t a problem. Because Blum is a dormant psychopath, having already avenged her tormented childhood on her adoptive parents – this episode forms the prologue. She sets off to discover the identity of those Dunya knows only as the photographer, the priest, the huntsman, the cook and the clown to exact revenge, and the reader has no doubts whatsoever that she will be succeed. Following his death, Blum listens to the recorded conversations between Mark and Dunya and becomes convinced that his death was not accidental. The woman, Dunya, making these claims had been written off as a fantasist by the police force, yet Mark felt otherwise.
Mark was a policeman, working off-the-record on a case involving allegations of kidnap and torture of illegal refugees.
At 600 pages, this is a doorstopper to lose yourself in.Nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award by the Salzburg City LibraryĮight years of married bliss are brought to an abrupt halt when Brünhilde Blum’s husband is killed in a hit and run. The Fifth Heart’s dominant mode is suspense, not self-consciousness, and at its core is a good old-fashioned mystery involving the death seven years earlier of Clover Adams, socialite wife of the historian Henry Adams. If you generally find this sort of thing tedious, fear not. Having dropped this bombshell, our third-person narrator interrupts the tale John Fowles-style to explain how and why he shifted point-of-view in the previous scene. A metafictional jeu d’esprit that dares to partner Sherlock Holmes with Henry James, it sets out its stall early on when, having persuaded a depressed James not to throw himself into the Seine – the pair meet by chance in Paris in 1893, during Sherlock’s Great Hiatus – Holmes reveals that he has trained his powers of ratiocination on himself and discovered that he is a fictional character. Dan Simmons’s The Fifth Heart (Sphere, £18.99) might sound similar, but intellectually it’s a richer brew. A few years back, Graham Moore’s The Holmes Affair introduced an improbable crimebusting duo in Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker.
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