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.
β...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.ββThe Independent (UK)
Praise for Petra Hammesfahr's The Sinner:
βThe Sinner is best psychological suspense novel I have read all year.ββDaily Telegraph
βDubbed Germanyβs answer to Patricia Highsmith, Hammesfahr should win new fans with this novel.βPublishers Weekly
βDemonstrates 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.βThe 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 Nadiaβs 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.
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