From the very center of Liechtenstein comes an author who precisely returns to the epicenter of all that noir that today encompasses everything. With his dyes of elegant policeman, Armin ohri is capable of taking us to that dark nineteenth-century time in which the criminal moved into the novel, thanks to Edgar Allan Poe among others.
And so Ohri ends up building stories between the ominous of the soul and the morbid of that dark side; Between the seediest black and the classic deduction of detective affairs. A mixture that in his case is pure delight thanks above all to that fetish protagonist who, in the case of his Julius Bentheim, leads us through the tightrope in all his investigations as a good amateur that he is.
A hard-earned job as an investigator in the most unsuspected way, cases that encompass everything from that unsuspected side of the criminal capable of undertaking any task focusing hatred or revenge on family members, authorities or whatever, because wanting to kill can be even a reason for that ... The question is to find the clues, to look into the abysses with the firm decision to extract the most due justice in a world of the XNUMXth century leaning towards modernity but still rocked in sticky shadows ...
Top recommended novels of Armin Öhri
The Dark Muse
In Berlin in 1865 a woman is brutally murdered. Julius Bentheim, a young law student who, thanks to his talent as a cartoonist, earns some money by sketching crime scenes, is collaborating with the investigation. All the evidence points to the guilt of the eccentric philosophy professor Botho Goltz, beginning with his own confession of the facts.
However, when the alleged murderer is finally brought to justice, he will show off such Machiavellian cunning - there is no murder weapon, no motive and the police have even unknowingly made some of the evidence disappear? that we will end up wondering if Goltz will pay for his sordid crime or if he will be able to justify his innocence to everyone.
This is a superb detective novel in which we hear echoes of the best Balzac, Dickens, Zola, and that creates a kind of mirror in which the darkest of nineteenth-century Berlin and the human condition are reflected. A masterful "kriminalroman" for which its author was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature, the first installment of which is destined to become one of the police sagas of our time.
The Cabinet of Occultists
A title whose term today sounds bizarre, grandiose and fanciful. But in that 19th century it took on another meaning. Because that occultism, the esoteric, which today remains a refuge for late-night television or radio programs, was once assumed as a possible approach to other worlds or dimensions that still gave meaning to certain incomprehensible things...
Prussia, New Year 1865. Baron von Falkenhayn has organized a grand celebration in his country castle. There, a séance takes place, attended by thirteen individuals, and which will prove to be mortal. Terror seizes the region from that very night, when the local pharmacist is crushed by what is described as the atrocious sound of horse hooves.
Against public opinion, the young law student Albrecht Krosick takes action and decides to found the "Cabinet of Occultists", which will also purposely consist of thirteen members. But the deaths do not stop, and his great friend Julius Bentheim, cartoonist for the police and amateur detective - "The Dark Muse" -, will have to face, in addition to the case, his own ghosts.
