City of Losers

Emma Novak and Mick Hammerl go in search of a lost son, and find people with more to hide than just their pasts…

Matthias can't stand being contradicted by women. When he takes off for the zoo to get away from his girlfriend Trixi for a while, he finds a red-haired woman in a white dress lying deathly quiet in the grass. A suicide? But the woman is not dead, and when she leaves the hospital, she visits Matthias to thank him – in her own way. Meanwhile, the detective agency Novak & Hammerl has a new client. Emma Novak, failed historian, and Mick Hammerl, failed hairdresser, are assigned to find the son of Greta Mautner who had given him up for adoption after birth. But when they find the man, the case takes a sudden turn, and the woman who is now found murdered in her house is really dead and her beautiful white dress ripped to pieces.

Lilian Faschinger's new novel draws an ironic and at times grotesque panorama of the city of Vienna and its residents – and shows how abruptly the scurrilous and funny can turn into a macabre and pathological criminal case.