Sons and Brothers
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Walking his dog along Bern’s icy Aare river, a surgeon in his seventies drowns. When his bruised corpse is found, his watch is missing. A mugging gone wrong? The more Swiss police detective Giuliana Linder and her assistant Renzo Donatelli learn about Johann Karl Gurtner, the more convinced they are that he was no random victim.
Talking to Gurtner’s family raises as many questions as it answers, but one thing becomes clear: the surgeon’s middle son, Markus, a photographer with a history of violence and substance abuse, has been a disappointment to his father all his life, and he is an increasingly plausible suspect for Gurtner’s murder. Other information leads Giuliana and Renzo back to the village where Gurtner was born, and, spending so much time together, they again have to deal with their attraction to one another and their ambivalence toward having an affair.
Alongside their investigation another story unfolds. During the year leading up to Gurtner’s death, his son Markus becomes friends with Jakob Amsler, a long-ago classmate of the surgeon’s. In contrast to the privileged young Gurtner, Jakob was a foster child, removed from his family by the authorities at nine and placed on a farm to work in terrible conditions. From Jakob, Markus learns that his father’s life contains some ugly secrets.
As Giuliana and Renzo discover more about Gurtner’s past, these secrets threaten to surface. Did Gurtner’s killer want to keep them hidden—or to force them out into the open at any cost?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The discovery of the body of Johann Karl Gurtner, a surgeon in his 70s, drives Hays's middling second whodunit featuring Swiss detectives Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli (after 2022's Pesticide). The police believe Gurtner was struck in the face while walking his dog and pushed into Bern's Aare River, where he drowned. Giuliana and Renzo's investigation into Gurtner's family and friends uncovers a prickly man with complicated relationships, yet no one with obvious motives to harm him. Their primary suspect is Gurtner's photographer son, Markus, whose strained relationship with his father and troubled past raise suspicion that their contentious relationship could have turned violent. After a chance encounter, Markus befriends Jakob Amsler, a former classmate of his father's, who was among the Swiss children taken from their families and forced into indentured servitude years before. Markus's attempt to learn more about his father through Jakob's experiences uncovers long-buried secrets with tragic consequences that reverberate in the present day. The routine plot never builds momentum, and readers will struggle to keep track of the large cast of mostly broad, inconsequential characters. Fans of international police procedurals can safely take a pass.
