After years of psychological and emotional abuse at the hands of her parents, our anti-heroine has hit upon exactly the right way to exact revenge and better yet, make the whole thing appear to be a tragic accident. Now Austrian author Bernhard Aichner has added his character, widow and mortician Brunhilde Blum, to a list stretching from Jim Thompson’s sheriff Lou Ford (The Killer Inside Me) to Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter.īlum is only just an adult when she kills her first victims – her adoptive parents. As readers, we are asked to empathise with every type of criminal, from small time grifters to murderers, sociopaths and even serial killers. At 600 pages, this is a doorstopper to lose yourself in.Written by Bernhard Aichner, translated by Anthea Bell - Placing the reader in a moral dilemma by asking them to empathise with a transgressive protagonist is something crime fiction has always done particularly well. 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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