The Sinner [Paperback]

One otherwise unremarkable sunny day, Cora Bender decides to end her life. Instead, she ends up stabbing a man to death in full view of his friends and her family. There seems no reason, and Cora, when taken into custody, is determined to keep the motivation for her actions hidden. When taken into custody she confesses, wanting it left at that, coming up with a tissue of lies when pressed for more detail. However, that isn't enough for police commissioner Rudolf Grovian, who embarks on a determined hunt for the real reason behind Cora's sudden frenzy, despite her desperate evasions and lies. It turns into a hunt that leads him to the revelation of one young woman's private, hellish past.

Petra Hammesfahr's The Sinner is a brilliant book, an absolutely masterly piece of crime fiction. Once again I find myself endlessly grateful for the continuing zeitgeist of translated crime, which means that we English readers get the treat of reading this exemplary psychological thriller, a haunting descent into the torments of one woman's youthful years. Gradually, through the screen of deceptions and half-truths Cora desperately tries to construct to stop people finding out and confronting her with reality, Hammesfahr pieces together the details of her tragic past, and one horrific instance in particular. It's a past and a psychology elaborated with compassion yet directness, a savage crime explained with a strange underlying tenderness for its perpetrator.

The Sinner immediately reminds you of the style of books written by Barbara Vine and Minette Walters, where harrowing events in the past are gradually uncovered and explain the present. It shares that with the Vine's, and it shares a quicker pace and more direct thrust with the Walters'; it has the piercing psychological insight that is common to both. And these are high compliments indeed. It's an immensely powerful novel, suspenseful from the first page to the last, and so very gripping; one of those books I can read late into the night without a care for sleep or any early starts I might have, all through a need to know exactly what drove Cora to do what she did, what could possibly lie behind it. One of the troubles with this kind of book is that a *lot* of build-up creates a reliance on a particularly satisfying pay-off, and sometimes that pay-off, the shocking secret, isn't good enough enough, but that's certainly not the case here. The whole thing builds into a satisfying, surprising (but very internally plausible) conclusion, a great final revelation which shocks at the same time as making complete sense. Hammesfahr conjures rationality out of a psychological mess, out of an opaque plot riven with both truth and lies, and in doing so shows how good her plotting has been, too.

In honesty, I can't really praise this book enough. It's a brilliant piece of work, focused, fascinating, and very well written indeed. It's a great mystery and a first-class psychological portrait of a woman tormented by her past. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a book where you never really know where you are, or necessarily where you're going, but you know you definitely want to be on the journey. There's been a lot of buzz about Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", and deservedly so, but this first translation from Hammesfahr is without doubt of equal quality, and deserves just as much praise. In the foreign crime novel stakes, it was best I read in 2007 (no, forget that: in the plain old crime novel stakes, it was the best I read in 2007), and, along with that Larsson, the crop for this year's Duncan Lawrie International looks very strong indeed... Read it. Then make them translate more.

There is a long history of thrillers that have an unreliable narrator. It can be a recipe for confusion; a mish-mash of half-baked thinking, illogical coincidences and muddled ideas. It takes an author of skill to navigate through these dangers and deliver a taut storyline.

For me, Hammesfahr manages this with some conviction, thought not without some difficulties. Cora is a fine character; at turns devious and obtuse, clear and confused, innocent and guilty. She is a superbly poor witness on her own behalf, weaving continuous half-truths and out-and-out fantasies with equal credibility. Overall, this makes the book compelling, intelligent and highly readable.

Personally, I would have liked the police characters to be more nuanced, and perhaps the ending was a little disappointing in its outcome. Overall, however, this is an excellent book, and I hope that future translations are as enjoyable. For those who admired the unreliable narrator, I would heartily recommend Natsuo Kirino's brilliant Grotesque. An even better example of how to carry off this kind of thriller.

In the vast preponderance of crime stories, the detective must examine means and motive (the how and why) in order to identify the culprit (the who). This English-language debut from German writer Hammesfahr flips the traditional arrangement, by making the who and the how absolutely clear from the start, and making the why completely unknown. There is no dispute that Cora Bender attacked a man at the park with a paring knife and killed him in plain sight of her own husband, son, and plenty of witnesses. What no one, including Commissioner Grovian, can figure out is why. And to my surprise, Hammesfahr manages to make his quest to understand the "why" into a gripping tale.

Even as Cora confesses and offers explanation, Grovian senses that her story isn't quite right. And for 300 pages, he prods, pokes, and literally digs into her past to try and figure out what triggered her seemingly senseless murder. Cora is a psychological mess, and as she throws out lies, half-truths, and whole truths in sometimes coherent, sometimes manic, monologues and interviews, Grovian is constantly sifting away. Cora's childhood was a very strange one, raised by an intensely Catholic mother, sexually frustrated father, and both religious and sexual themes pervade the story. Her youth was also overshadowed by her invalid younger sister, whose illness drained most of the family's energy, money, and love. Grovian must peel away at this complex family history to learn what triggered Cora, and the climactic revelation pays it all off beautifully.

I don't tend to go for crime stories that are this intensely psychological, but this is a corker. It's perhaps a touch to long, and in places a touch too slow, but these are relatively minor quibbles considering the mesmerizing tale. The comparisons to Patricia Highsmith are valid, and hopefully some of Hammesfahr's twenty or so other books are equally good and will become available in English.