Kapfenberg in the Austrian Steiermark region, 1957: In the course of a custody battle, Anna Koinegg reports her child’s father, a former member of the Waffen-SS, for having participated in the execution of Jews. The accusation relates to the shooting of 29 Hungarian Jewish forced labourers in Jennersdorf in the early days of 1945, in which he was supposedly involved. But the political mood favours suppression and the charges are brushed under the carpet – until in 1966 the German authorities become involved and the case lands on the desk of former Spanish Civil War activist and detective Hans Landauer. Together the Mannheim lawyers and the disagreeable inspector from Vienna travel to Jennersdorf, to brake the wall of silence and uncover the traces of a massacre that nobody wants to remember...

“Everything started when I, an Austrian living in Slovakia, read about a Slovak who had been found dead in on of Austria’s rivers - naked.” The last time Denisa Soltísová was seen alive, she was wandering around in an austrian city; it was January the 19th 2008, at night , only wearing underwear. Days after this incident she was found – dead and naked. The 29-year-old woman was a collegegraduate, Slovak and worked round-the-clock as a elderly care nurse. The police closed the case: “Suicide”. Yet the autopsy, performed in Slovakia, showed traces of violence. It is 700 kilometres from Ratkovská Lehota, where Desisa lived, to the place she died. Two different worlds that are parted by 700 kilometres, linked only by commuting busses, full of nurses. Two different worlds in which Martin Leidenfrost tracked the traces of one of them who will never return to the other side of the borders.

Where is the child prodigy? In the shadow of Mozart, even murder becomes art. Birgit has disappeared: The ten year-old musical prodigy is abducted in Salzburg, right under Mozart’s eyes, so to speak. This happens just when she is supposed to compete in the finals of an international piano competition after beating her friend Anja, daughter of a respectable family, in the semi-finals. Her friend’s father, manager of the state’s largest energy corporation, political lackey and pawn declared fair game in the local political scene, is definitely keen on seeing his daughter make a quick career. His ambition catches the attention of chief inspector Laber, who, struggling to solve his first case, must find his place in an intricate web of power and music, beauty and cruelty. From one day to the next, fingers in the city start pointing in several directions – to the murderer as well? All the while, Mozart silently weeps on his pedestal: full of anger, but also full of laughter and ardor for this book.

Novak is a late bloomer when it comes to the wide world of emotions, which he discovers in a hospital, of all places. Because his hospital roommate keeps him from sleeping, the Indonesian nurse Manuela lends him her walkman and tapes, thus infecting him with her love of opera. After being discharged Novak somehow can’t get back into the routine of his regular, ordinary life. Manuela has opened his ears – not only to opera, but also to the annoying racket of everyday life: noise from lawn mowers, jackhammers and his wife Herta. While he continues his new of listening to opera, Herta suspects another woman behind his new passion. She’s not that far off the mark. But Manuela suddenly disappears. Was she merely an illusion on the stage of Novak’s middle-aged dreams? Or could his wife somehow be involved in her quiet disappearance? Even without her, the grand finale is a striking as an opera: cruelly dramatic.

Journalist Martin Koller is in hospital and cannot sleep. He is tortured by strange sounds in his ear that have thrown him into a deep depression. The fact that his wife desperately wants a child from him and that a young, ambitious colleague is messing with his research in the right-wing extremist scene isn’t exactly helping. Then he finds out that his mother is on the brink of death. So he pulls himself together and heads back to his childhood home. He spends a few days alone with his mother. And then, the visitors start showing up and taking over the entire house. They’re all over the place: in the cellar, in the rooms, in the attic. No one knows where they came from, no one knows what they want. A doctor Martin has known since his youth calls and tells him that she has made a mysterious discovery. A nightmare begins.