Here are 100 books that A Death in Vienna fans have personally recommended if you like
A Death in Vienna.
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I adore being immersed in a riveting mystery series where the characters become as familiar as neighbors. And I’m a bit of a piggy when it comes to food – I love reading about it, browsing through cookbooks (or chef reels), and inventing my own recipes. These five authors are on my list of All-Time Favorite Authors (it’s on my website) first, because they write gripping mysteries, and second, because of the captivating way they describe the food the characters prepare or consume. In fact, I’ll have to stop here to get myself a snack. I wonder if I have any poppyseed cake in the fridge.
Bruno (Benoît Courrèges) is a policeman who enjoys the slow pace of country life in the South of France.
He was formerly a soldier and relishes his peaceful daily routines of patrolling the lovely village of St. Denis, shopping for groceries, and cooking magnificent meals. Occasionally, bad guys show up, crimes of one kind or another disturb Bruno’s peace, and he must use his detective skills.
I especially love the care he puts into his wine pairings, no matter how many villains are on the loose.
The first Dordogne Mystery starring Bruno, Chief of Police, France's favourite cop. EU inspectors are causing havoc in the little town of St Denis and local tempers are running high, but is it really cause for murder?
Market day in the ancient town of St Denis in south-west France. EU hygiene inspectors have been swooping on France's markets, while the locals hide contraband cheese in their houses and call the Brussels bureaucrats 'Gestapo'. Local police chief Bruno supports their resistance. Although, here in what was once Vichy France, words like 'Gestapo' and 'resistance' still carry a profound resonance.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I adore being immersed in a riveting mystery series where the characters become as familiar as neighbors. And I’m a bit of a piggy when it comes to food – I love reading about it, browsing through cookbooks (or chef reels), and inventing my own recipes. These five authors are on my list of All-Time Favorite Authors (it’s on my website) first, because they write gripping mysteries, and second, because of the captivating way they describe the food the characters prepare or consume. In fact, I’ll have to stop here to get myself a snack. I wonder if I have any poppyseed cake in the fridge.
Although I’ve read well over half of the 33 novels in Leon’s Mystery series, I have yet to add her to my ongoing list of All-Time Favorite Mystery Authors.
I never tire of Brunetti’s quest to solve crimes involving a myriad of social problems, or his fantastic 3-course lunches, prepared by his university-employed wife, always with the perennially teenage son and daughter in attendance. Sometimes Comisario Brunetti will stop to pick up one of the courses, but his brilliant wife manages most of the time despite her course load.
And the coffee – Brunetti enjoys a quick shot of espresso in the morning, but there are often pastries, and nobody ever complains about gaining weight. Aside from the food, the mysteries are always riveting and fun to read.
'A splendid series . . . with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell it.' The Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Suntory Mystery Fiction Grand Prize __________________________________
The twisted maze of Venice's canals has always been shrouded in mystery. Even the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death ... but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, who was poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Even Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, used to the labyrinthine corruptions of the city, is shocked at the number of…
I adore being immersed in a riveting mystery series where the characters become as familiar as neighbors. And I’m a bit of a piggy when it comes to food – I love reading about it, browsing through cookbooks (or chef reels), and inventing my own recipes. These five authors are on my list of All-Time Favorite Authors (it’s on my website) first, because they write gripping mysteries, and second, because of the captivating way they describe the food the characters prepare or consume. In fact, I’ll have to stop here to get myself a snack. I wonder if I have any poppyseed cake in the fridge.
Inspector Montalbano Mysteries features Sicilian detective Salvo Montalbano, who solves crimes involving social issues, immigration, and the Mafia, while enjoying the best that Sicilian cuisine has to offer.
After reading five or six (it was before I started keeping track) of his mysteries, I already added Camilleri to my list of All-Time Favorite Mystery Authors, but I’d still like to read more of the 28 novels in the series.
I will admit that I don’t eat the meats and sea creatures that Inspector Montalbano enjoys, but I love the descriptions of pastas and pastries, and I’ve dreamt of visiting Sicily because of this series.
The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano. This edition with a stunning redesigned cover.
The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I adore being immersed in a riveting mystery series where the characters become as familiar as neighbors. And I’m a bit of a piggy when it comes to food – I love reading about it, browsing through cookbooks (or chef reels), and inventing my own recipes. These five authors are on my list of All-Time Favorite Authors (it’s on my website) first, because they write gripping mysteries, and second, because of the captivating way they describe the food the characters prepare or consume. In fact, I’ll have to stop here to get myself a snack. I wonder if I have any poppyseed cake in the fridge.
Ashley is another author on my All-Time Favorite Mystery author list.
I remember meeting her protagonist in the first Below Stairs mystery when it launched in 2018. Kat Holloway is a young cook in Victorian London with a somewhat troubled past. For six days each week, she coordinates dinners, oversees the stores of food, and bakes her famous seedcake, but on her day off, she steps out with her beau, Daniel, a Scotland Yard detective. Or she visits her daughter.
I love reading about Kat’s meal plans and sinking into the rarified world of working for the very wealthy.
Victorian class lines are crossed when cook Kat Holloway is drawn into a murder that reaches all the way to the throne.
Highly sought-after young cook Kat Holloway takes a position in a Mayfair mansion and soon finds herself immersed in the odd household of Lord Rankin. Kat is unbothered by the family’s eccentricities as long as they stay away from her kitchen, but trouble finds its way below stairs when her young Irish assistant is murdered.
Intent on discovering who killed the helpless kitchen maid, Kat turns to the ever-capable Daniel McAdam, who is certainly much more than the…
In my work as a news reporter and war correspondent, I met people on the worst day of their lives. I always wondered: What now? How will they get on with life? My own parents faced that dreadful dilemma. Penniless refugees, their families murdered in the Holocaust, unemployed in London, how on earth did they find the strength to carry on? One day at a time, they just did what they had to do. That is the subject of my fiction, always trying to answer that existential question: How do we live with trauma, and still find love and happiness?
A sensitive yet relentless story of his family’s failed assimilation that ends in its annihilation. Clare ends up in the UK, seeking meaning, in vain. His story so closely mirrors the real-life story of my own family, also Jewish refugees from Vienna who found refuge in the UK, that it sent a chill down my spine. Beautifully written and evocative. Clare concludes with Voltaire’s verdict: “History never repeats itself, man always does.”
On Saturday 26 February, 1938, seventeen-year-old Georg Klaar took his girlfriend Lisl to his first ball at the Konzerthaus. His family were proudly Austrian. They were also Jewish. Just two weeks later came the Anschluss. A family had been condemned to death by genocide.
This new edition of George Clare's incredibly affecting account of Nazi brutality towards the Jews includes a previously unpublished post-war letter from his Uncle to a friend who had escaped to Scotland. This moving epistle passes on the news of those who had survived and the many who had been arrested, deported, murdered or left to…
I am a long-time writer and reader of mystery novels and short stories, but I have also written contemporary novels, scholarly work in history and culture, and history books. I am particularly interested in the psychology of crime and of detectives, and in each of the books I’ve recommended, the characters are drawn with unusual subtlety and depth or are interestingly eccentric. In addition, Vargas’s novels usually include interesting and little-known historical information, while Tallis’s Lieberman Papers series gives a lively picture of Vienna in its golden age of culture without neglecting the disquieting anti-Semitism and political unrest under the surface.
Two reasons for this selection: the setting cosmopolitan pre- WW1 Vienna with its glittering art world, cutting edge science, and murky politics, and the unusual sleuth, Dr. Max Liebermann, a young disciple of Sigmund Freud, who is called upon by his friend, Oskar Rheinhardt for particularly sticky cases. There are plenty of them, thanks to author Tallis’s background as a clinical psychologist. He embeds gruesome crimes in complex plots and constructs solutions of real ingenuity, in parallel with young Dr. Liebermann’s developing expertise and his negotiation of the tricky balance between modernity, science, and progressive developments and his more traditional, and beloved, Jewish family.
The hit novels behind the major new TV series Vienna Blood ___________________________ Vienna, at the turn of the century.
Philosophy, science and art are flourishing. Coffee shops are full of the latest cultural and political theories. The new field of psychoanalysis, formed in the wake of Freud, is just beginning to make itself heard.
And a woman is dead.
Dr Max Liebermann is a young psychoanalyst, and friend to Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt. Rheinhardt, though hard-working, lacks Liebermann's insights and forensic eye - and so Liebermann is called upon to help with police investigations surrounding the death of a beautiful…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I'm a child of Holocaust survivors who spent three years in slave labour camps. My mother told me stories of her experiences a child should probably not hear. The result is that my philosophy of life, and sometimes my writing, can be dark. It’s no surprise that this period of history imbues my novels. I chose to write mysteries to reach a wider audience, the Holocaust connections integral to the stories. During my research, I discovered a wealth of information on the Holocaust but learned that memoirs revealed best what happened to people on the ground. Memoirs draw you into the microcosm of a person’s life with its nostalgia, yearning, and inevitable heartbreak.
This unlikely story has a different focus from other Holocaust memoirs. After working in a slave labour camp, Edith Hahn, a Viennese Jew, was ordered to report for transport east, and probable death, but instead went into hiding with a new identity thanks to two Christian friends. Jews hiding in plain sight were called U-boats. Though trained as a lawyer, she worked as an ignorant nurse’s aide in a hospital and met a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. She told him she was Jewish but he wanted to marry her anyway and became both a protector and a constant threat. In an unsentimental style and with surprising dark humour, Hahn has written a gripping account of that period when being found out would have been fatal.
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her and her mother into a ghetto, issuing them papers branded with a "J". Soon Edith was taken away to a labour camp and when she returned home after months away she found her mother had been deported. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not. Using the woman's identity papers, she fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her and, despite her protests and even her eventual…
I am the author of the Herringford and Watts mysteries, the Van Buren and DeLuca mysteries, and the Three Quarter Time series of contemporary Viennese-set romances. I am also the author of The London Restoration. My non-fiction includesDream, Plan and Go: A Travel Guide to Inspire Independent Adventure andA Very Merry Holiday Movie Guide. I live in Toronto, Canada.
The second in the Liebermann Papers: a mystery series featuring Freud-student Max Liebermann noted as literature’s first psychoanalytic detective who helps the pragmatic and gruff Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt solve some of fin-de-siecle Vienna’s most dastardly crimes. While since made into a successful PBS series, the book’s atmospheric rendering of the Baroque jewel’s opulence is countered by the stark portrayals of anti-semitism, paranoia, and the primitive, cruel, and rudimentary techniques used to “treat” patients suffering from mental disorders.
In the grip of a Siberian winter in 1902, a serial killer in Vienna embarks upon a bizarre campaign of murder. Vicious mutilation, a penchant for arcane symbols, and a seemingly random choice of victim are his most distinctive peculiarities. Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt summons a young disciple of Freud - his friend Dr. Max Liebermann - to assist him with the case. The investigation draws them into the sphere of Vienna's secret societies - a murky underworld of German literary scholars, race theorists, and scientists inspired by the new evolutionary theories coming out of England. At first, the killer's…
I am the author of the Herringford and Watts mysteries, the Van Buren and DeLuca mysteries, and the Three Quarter Time series of contemporary Viennese-set romances. I am also the author of The London Restoration. My non-fiction includesDream, Plan and Go: A Travel Guide to Inspire Independent Adventure andA Very Merry Holiday Movie Guide. I live in Toronto, Canada.
Recalling Ibbotson’s personal experience of leaving Austria for England before Hitler’s Anschluss, The Morning Gift is a witty and warm marriage of convenience story between a witty and intrepid archaeologist, Quinton Somerville, and a brilliant professor’s daughter Ruth Berger. When Ruth is accidentally left behind in Vienna after her family has emigrated to England, Quin marries Jewish Ruth and protects her from oncoming Nazi occupation: under the condition that they will part ways when both are safely back in London. But Quin and Ruth continue to run into each other again and again and again. A deliciously Austrian-flavoured book. Ibbotson’s Viennese set-sequences and memories are a love letter to her city.
The Morning Gift is a beautiful, classic romance from much loved author, Eva Ibbotson.
Eighteen-year-old Ruth lives in the sparkling city of Vienna with her family, where she delights in its music, energy and natural beauty. She is wildly in love with the brilliant young pianist Heini Radik and can't wait until they are married.
But Ruth's world is turned upside down when the Nazis invade Austria and her family are forced to flee to England, and through a devastating misunderstanding she is left behind. Her only hope to escape Vienna comes from Quin, a young English professor, who unexpectedly…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London University’s Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive “Exilarte” based at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.
This is a novel that is tender and sad, and it relates in a language that is simple and poetic to the atmosphere of the Habsburg Empire during its final days. The novel takes place in the provinces rather than in the capital. Every line of the book can be savored, with every sentence laden with nostalgia for a world that seems like another, kinder planet. It is the world that pre-dated one of my other recommendations, The Strudlhof Steps, in its presentation of people with a sense of purpose, duty, and loyalty, even if not blessed with an abundance of acumen.
These were well-intentioned people trying to hold an empire together of disparate people and cultures. The empire represented an ideal world of Habsburg paternalism to Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians. It is difficult to conclude the book without tears. No cinematic version has done it justice—nothing captures the…
'One of the greatest novels ever written' Philippe Sands
Roth's masterpiece: an epic, moving account of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, told through the fortunes of one family.
Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March…
