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Published Aug 2009
272 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
Paperback Original. Despite his failing health and his girlfriend's pleading, Gerhard Self won't stop doing what he does best—investigating. And his most recent case is one of the most intriguing of his career. Herr Welker desperately wants to write a history of his bank, but to do so he needs Self to track down a mysterious silent partner. Self takes the job, but is soon accosted by a man who frantically hands him a suitcase full of cash and speeds off in a car, only to crash into a tree, dying instantly. Perplexed, and convinced there is more to the case than he is being told, Self follows the money. Soon he finds himself traveling to eastern Germany, where he encounters some of the most unsavory villains he has met yet.
"Crisp prose and some well-handled plot complications, which include the emergence of a man claiming to be Self's son, will keep readers turning the pages." - Publishers Weekly
"Schlink constructs a series of Chinese boxes whose increasingly untidy carpentry - the case ends with the appealingly reflective hero far more bewildered than he began - is exactly his point." - Kirkus Reviews
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bernhard Schlink was born July 6, 1944 in Bethel, Germany, the youngest of four children. He studied law at West Berlin’s Free University, graduating in 1968. He served as a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia beginning in 1988, and became a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany in 1992, a position he held until his retirement in 2006.
Schlink began his career as a writer with several detective novels, one of which one the Glauser Prize in 1989. The Reader was published in 1995 and became a bestseller in both Germany and the United States. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997 it won the Hans Fallada Prize, an ...
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