The Wild Boar - Hardcover

Mettler, Felix

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880641347 ISBN 13: 9780880641340

Publisher: Fromm Intl, 1995

Synopsis

Commissioner Haberli uses his intuition to solve the murder of a victim whose body is first discovered in the trunk of a doctor's car, but then mysteriously vanishes

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

From Kirkus Reviews:

The ghost of D rrenmatt's The Judge and His Hangman hovers over this sweet, sad tale of murder and mortality at St. Stephan's Clinic--a bestseller in its native Switzerland. The news that he has terminal lung cancer galvanizes quiet Gottfried Sonder, a former butcher now nearing retirement from the autopsy lab at St. Stephan's, to kill the man he thinks ought to be dying instead of him--boorish, chain-smoking Dr. Horst G tze, who first diagnosed his illness. Identifying G tze with the wild boar who'd wounded him during an African hunt, Sonder lies in wait for his prey and, with the help of a blowpipe dart and some slick timing, pulls off a perfect murder--too perfect, since he ends up unwillingly incriminating impulsive gray eminence Harald (Caesar) B ni, whose car he's forced to use to dispose of G tze's body, and spreading suspicion over the uniformly sympathetic staff at St. Stephan's--from Sonder's physician Bruno Thalmann to doctoral student Pat Wyss. Even before Caesar's been able to dump G tze's day-old corpse into an uncooperative lake (some nicely agitated comedy here) and cobbled together an alibi with the help of his old friend Prof. Eugene (Wotan) Rusterholz, Commissioner H berli is already asking questions about the whereabouts of the vanished, unmourned G tze. Intuitive H berli may remind American readers of Lt. Columbo, but first-novelist Mettler, like his appealing little- man killer, is after much bigger game: an examination of the ways in which the virus of Sonder's mortality, his peevish struggle with death, infects the whole pathology lab, and eventually H berli as well. Not a mystery, or even a very good inverted detective story, but a parable, and a fine one, about the remarkable difficulty of leave-taking. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fromm Intl
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0880641347
• ISBN 13: 9780880641340
• Binding: Hardcover