Return to Sender

Return to Sender – A Styrian Crime Novel (Thomas Reiterer, Book 2)



After the nightmare in the Luisenstollen mine, Chief Inspector Thomas Reiterer has only one job: to recover. He has three weeks of sick leave, a small hotel in Velden and Advent lights glittering over Lake Wörthersee. Then one morning Ferdl, the friendly local postman, fails to turn up for his coffee. His van is found by the lake with the door wide open. Yet his delivery round carries on in the system, parcel after parcel, right up to the final scan at 13:58.



He is only the first. Along the old postal road through Völkermarkt, Wolfsberg and over the Pack pass, more postal workers vanish. They leave behind fake court summonses, a stamp reading "Return to Sender" and, at night, the sound of a post horn drifting through the fog. As the country rages over a new parcel tax, a telephone rings in Graz's historic main post office. It hasn't been connected to a line in years. The demand: repeal the parcel tax by Wednesday, 10 p.m. Otherwise all the officials will die.



Together with Carinthian detective Martina Ogris and his colleague Selma Begić, Reiterer hunts a kidnapper who leads the police back to one Christmas week in 2019. Nobody in Wolfsberg has spoken of that week for seven years. And it raises a question no one wants to answer: who looked away?



Seventy-two hours. Four people in the dark. And a truth that is finally being delivered.



An atmospheric crime novel set between Lake Wörthersee and Graz, about guilt, silence and when a wrong is ever truly over. Book 2 in the Thomas Reiterer series; can be read on its own.