Is the connection between a husband and a wife about
physical appearance, some mystical and romantic recognition
of souls, or merely the day-to-day routines that form habit
and convenience? Such high-brow philosophy is not usually
at the top of Susanne Lasko's thought processes. She's not
stupid; it's just that on one momentous day, her primary
concerns revolve around her hopes to do well at a job
interview. Instead, she gets thrown into the strangest of
modern prince-and-the-pauper situations when she meets a
woman with her face, a woman far more interested in her
than she is in anything this woman, this Nadia Trenkler,
can offer her.
THE LIE quickly develops beyond the potential
predictability of its initial set up and forces the reader
to plunge into layers of intrigue that are well-worth
unraveling.
“...One shares Susanne's belief that she must try to
carry the deception off. Whether she will succeed keeps the
reader, peering over Susanne's shoulder at all the traps,
turning the pages of this remarkable book.”—The
Independent (UK)
Praise for Petra
Hammesfahr's The Sinner:
“The
Sinner is best psychological suspense novel I have read
all year.”—Daily Telegraph
“Dubbed Germany’s
answer to Patricia Highsmith, Hammesfahr should win new fans
with this novel.”Publishers Weekly
“Demonstrates why she is one of Germany's bestselling
writers of crime and psychological thrillers. It's grim,
delves deep into the human psyche, and keeps you
gripped.”The Times (London)
Nadia and
Susanne look uncannily alike, but one of the women is
seriously rich and the other is destitute. When Nadia asks
Susanne to spend the weekend with her husband so that she
can sneak off with a lover, how can Susanne refuse the
outrageous payment on offer? Nadia and her husband barely
speak to each other and he will be working most of the
weekend. Easy money, or so it seems.
One Friday
afternoon Susanne drives Nadia’s Alfa to her beautiful
suburban villa with its indoor pool and glass doors opening
onto the sloping lawn. This first stay is followed by
others, as an apparently harmless game becomes a deadly web
of lies.
Petra Hammesfahr, born in
1951, has not had an easy life: she left school at thirteen
and became pregnant by an alcoholic husband at seventeen.
She published her first novel when she was forty and has
since written over twenty crime and suspense novels. Petra
also writes scripts for television and film. She has won
numerous literary prizes, including the Crime Prize of
Wiesbaden and the Rhineland Literary Prize.