The Hermit
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
* THE MULTI-AWARD WINNING BESTSELLER FOR FANS OF THE BRIDGE *
Winner of the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel
Winner of the Danish Debutant Award
Winner of the Harald Mogensen Prize for the best Danish crime novel
A car is found on a deserted beach on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura. On the back seat lies a cardboard box containing the body of a small boy buried in newspaper cuttings. No one knows his name, and there is no trace of a driver. The last thing an ailing tourist resort needs is a murder, and the police are desperate to close the case.
The island is rife with rumours about the reclusive Erhard. Two decades of self-imposed exile from his wife and children have left him alienated and alone, whiling away his days in a drunken haze, driving an old taxi to get by. This unlikeliest of detectives determines to solve the crime himself – and he has nothing to lose. But how can one old man, cut off from the modern world, solve a murder whose dangerous web of deceit stretches far beyond the small island? And what if the killer forces Erhard to confront his own long-buried past?
Winner of the prestigious Glass Key Award and an instant bestseller in Denmark, The Hermit is taking the international publishing world by storm. Acutely observed and psychologically penetrating, this is existential noir at its finest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Erhard, the 60ish hero of Rydahl's brilliant, scathing debut, which won the Glass Key Award in 2015 for best Nordic crime novel, is a down-at-heels expatriate Danish cabbie and sometime piano tuner. This "old man with tired eyes" has lived in a shack on Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, with only two skittish goats for company for about 20 years. He sends much of his meager earnings to his ex-wife and daughters in Denmark, drinks too much, and occasionally scavenges dumpsters for food. When a three-month-old baby boy is found starved to death in a cardboard box in a car that washes up on the beach, Erhard is outraged. With virtually no resources, lacking a computer and the savvy to use one, but drawing on his own wits and calling in a multitude of favors, Erhard doggedly traces the dead baby's mother and uncovers a complex smuggling scheme. Stunningly conceived and expertly executed, this portrayal of one man's thirst for justice in the face of human corruption proves that not even a self-isolated hermit can be an island unto himself.
