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Self's Deception (Gerhard Self Series) by Bernhard Schlink — book cover

Self's Deception (Gerhard Self Series)

by Bernhard Schlink, Peter Constantine (Translator), Peter Constantine
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Overview

Gerhard Self, the dour private detective, returns in this riveting crime novel about terrorism, governmental cover-up, and the treacherous waters where they mix.

Leo Salger, the daughter of a powerful Bonn bureaucrat, is missing, and Self has been hired to find her. His investigation initially leads him to a psych ward at a local hospital, where he is made to believe that Leo fell from a window and died. Self soon discovers, however, that Leo is alive and well and that she was involved in a terrorist incident the government is feverishly trying to keep under wraps. The result is a wildly entertaining, superbly nuanced thriller that follows one detective’s desire to uncover the truth, wherever it may lead.

Synopsis

Gerhard Self, the dour private detective, returns in this riveting crime novel about terrorism, governmental cover-up, and the treacherous waters where they mix.

Leo Salger, the daughter of a powerful Bonn bureaucrat, is missing, and Self has been hired to find her. His investigation initially leads him to a psych ward at a local hospital, where he is made to believe that Leo fell from a window and died. Self soon discovers, however, that Leo is alive and well and that she was involved in a terrorist incident the government is feverishly trying to keep under wraps. The result is a wildly entertaining, superbly nuanced thriller that follows one detective’s desire to uncover the truth, wherever it may lead.

The New York Times - Charles Taylor

Bernhard Schlink's weathered private detective, Gerhard Self, makes for pretty good company in Self's Deception, the third book in Schlink's Self series, translated here by Peter Constantine. Like any fictional detective worth spending time with, Self, a public prosecutor during the Third Reich who turned to private investigation, transmits a strong sense of being comfortable with who he is, imperfections and all.

About the Author, Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Reader, as well as four prize-winning crime novels-The Gordian Knot, Self's Fraud, Self's Punishment, and Self Slaughter—that are currently being translated into English. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.

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Editorials

Charles Taylor

Bernhard Schlink's weathered private detective, Gerhard Self, makes for pretty good company in Self's Deception, the third book in Schlink's Self series, translated here by Peter Constantine. Like any fictional detective worth spending time with, Self, a public prosecutor during the Third Reich who turned to private investigation, transmits a strong sense of being comfortable with who he is, imperfections and all.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In German author Schlink's meandering second crime novel available in English to feature aging PI Gerhard Self (after Self'sPunishment), a man named Salger hires Self to locate his missing daughter, Leonore. With little help from the father, Self tracks the missing girl to an insane asylum outside Heidelberg, where he's informed by a doctor that Leo has recently died there in an accident. Self quickly learns, among other details, that the death report is untrue, Leo's father is not really her father and that the case is connected to a top-secret government investigation. Self can be completely off the wall one minute—he lies outrageously to anyone who might have information and breaks-and-enters without compunction—and the next he's as comfortable as an old shoe, having a glass of Riesling and hanging out with his cat, Turbo. The eccentric detective is the big draw, with the less than action-packed investigation coming in a distant second. (June)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Ex-Nazi prosecutor Gerhard Self (Self's Punishment, 2005), still working as a private eye in a reunified Germany, gets a case that involves somebody else's political guilt, or lack thereof. Undersecretary Salger's daughter has gone missing from the Heidelberg Institute for Translation and Interpretation, where, like a good European, she'd been studying French and English. Although the minister's manners are brusque to the point of rudeness, Self likes the look of Leonore Salger's photo and the sound of her father's banknotes. So he makes some routine inquiries and discovers from Dr. Rolf Wendt that Leo had been a patient at the State Psychiatric Hospital until she fell out a fourth-story window last week. The story of her death rings so patently untrue-no relatives have been notified, there's been no inquiry into the details of the accident, nobody else in the hospital knows that it even happened-that Self keeps digging, and all too soon realizes he's dug entirely too far. Leo isn't dead but in hiding; she's on the run from state officials who want to interview her about a terrorist attack on an American military installation in the Lampertheim National Forest; the government is less interested in exposing the consequences of the attack than in covering them up; and it looks as if Self's client isn't really Leo's father or an undersecretary of anything. Antic, laconic, melancholy and oddly extroverted-a tonic corrective for two generations of German self-scrutiny.

Book Details

Published
June 1, 2007
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages
352
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780375709081

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