The Quiet Twin
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In Nazi-occupied Vienna, a string of unsolved murders
has thrown the residents of one apartment building into
a state of uneasy watchfulness. Anton Beer, a young doctor
who has made a study of forensic psychology, is asked by the
retired Professor Speckstein to investigate. It is an unwelcome
request: Speckstein’s job is to spy on the building’s residents
for the Nazis, and Doctor Beer has his own reasons for keeping
his private life hidden from public scrutiny. When Beer
discovers a paralyzed young woman in a neighbour’s apartment,
his life is further complicated. The woman is unable to
talk and deathly ill, and Beer, whose own wife has recently left
him, smuggles her into his home to nurse her in secret.
As the story unfolds in propulsive, gripping prose, Dan
Vyleta captures the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion that
was part of encroaching Nazi culture, and explores our disturbing
instinct in times of threat to turn a blind eye to uncomfortable
realities. The darkest mystery at the heart of this astonishing
novel reveals itself to be not a question of whodunit so
much as the temper of a diseased society in which every person’s
actions are infected by the possibility of evil.
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Author Extras
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Critical Praise for
The Quiet Twin
"Vital, deftly realised characters populate Vyleta's simmering narrative....The Quiet Twin is a sharp and confident novel that captures the social paranoia and mistrust fomented by Nazism....Vyleta's subtly engaging thriller is tense with violent acts."
- The Independent (UK)
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"[The Quiet Twin] pungently recreates the noxious ethos in which [Nazism] flourished, resembling Hitchcock’s Rear Window rescripted by Dostoevsky and Kafka."
- The Sunday Times
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"Nimble, nuanced, fierce, scrupulous."
- Times Literary Supplement
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The Quiet Twin
In Nazi-occupied Vienna, a string of unsolved murders has thrown the residents of one apartment building into a state of uneasy watchfulness. Anton Beer, a young doctor who has made a study of forensic psychology, is asked by the retired Professor Speckstein to investigate. It is an unwelcome...
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The Crooked Maid
From the writer praised as a cross between Hitchcock and Dostoyevsky, a dark and suspenseful novel set in post-war Vienna among the spectators in a criminal trial Mid-summer, 1948. Two strangers, Anna Beer and young Robert Seidel, meet on a train as they return to Vienna, where life is just...
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