The Fig Eater [Paperback]

It is August 1910, and Vienna is still the beautiful gas-lit jewel of a grand, if fading, empire. One night in the Volksgarten, a young woman is found strangled and an unnamed police officer takes the case. The victim is the highly strung daughter of a bourgeois family, and the search for her murderer soon becomes serious. Yet painstaking forensics yield little except one curious clue: Dora ate a fresh fig--unavailable in Vienna in August--only moments before she died. The inspector shares the details with his Hungarian wife, who is well versed in Gypsy lore, not to mention the odder features of the human psyche, and she immediately begins her own private inquiry:

When Erszébet smelled the disinfectant, the scent of the girl on his hands, she suddenly wished to possess her. To understand the puzzle of how her life led to her death. To know her. When she first heard the girl had died in the park, there was something--a needle prick of menace, a cruel loneliness--that was familiar. It felt true as a memory. This recognition startled her.

Dora's life may have been outwardly proper, but it turns out to have been charged with sexuality: her best friend, Frau Zellenga, was her family's neighbour and her father's mistress. Even as the two families pretend the situation is normal and that Dora must have been killed by a stranger, the inspector and Erszébet both suspect that the girl must have known her killer. Soon, even the rational inspector turns to the supernatural world for clues.

The term atmospheric is perhaps too often applied to historical mysteries, but Jody Shields's first novel merges science and mysticism, the historical details of Viennese daily life and its repressed eroticism so gorgeously that it transcends that description. --Barrie Trinkle --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

"'A glorious maze of dead ends and false leads...gruesome and highly mysterious, it is an exciting new brand of detective story' The Spectator 'Authentically eerie and erotic - a Viennese dance of death' Victoria Glendinning 'An artful and evocative thriller, rich in the texture of corruption' Independent"

A dark, multi-layered, mesmerizing literary novel of suspense, superstition and latent eroticism set in fin-de-siécle Vienna.

'He watches her eating one fig, then two more, grinding the seeds between her teeth, the sound echoing in her head, perhaps the last sound Dora heard before there was the thunder of blood in her ears...'

Vienna, 1910. On a warm August night, the body of a young girl is discovered in the city's celebrated Volksgarten. She has been strangled. Using the latest forensic methods and psychological thinking, the Chief Inspector of Police begins his painstaking search for the killer. He is not alone, however. His wife Erszébet - an exotic, passionate woman steeped in the folk tales and Gypsy lore of her native Hungary - becomes obsessed with the dead girl. In secret, and enlisting the help of a young English governess, she conducts her own investigation of the murder, guided by intuition, instinct and superstition... With its beautifully-evoked setting of Vienna just prior to the Great War, a city embracing the modern and yet in thrall to superstition and prejudice, and riven by corruption, perverse sexual practices and disease, The Fig Eater is a rich and seductive period page-turner of a novel.

He watches her eating one fig, then two more, grinding the seeds between her teeth, the sound echoing in her head, perhaps the last sound Dora heard before there was the thunder of blood in her ears...

Vienna, 1910. On a warm August night, the body of a young girl is discovered in the city's celebrated Volksgarten. She has been strangled. Using the latest forensic methods, the Chief Inspector of Police begins his painstaking search for the killer. He is not alone, however. His wife Erszébet - a woman steeped in the folk tales and Gypsy lore of her native Hungary - becomes obsessed with the dead girl. In secret, she conducts her own investigation of the murder, guided by intuition, instinct and superstitution.

Set against the brooding backdrop of fin-de-siècle Vienna, The Fig Eater is a mesmerizing novel of suspense and latent eroticism.

A resident of New York, Jody Shields is the former Design Editor of the New York Times magazine and a former Contributing Editor of American Vogue and House and Garden. The author of two non-fiction books on fashion, she has also written several screenplays and is a collected artist. The Fig Eater is her first novel.