Tag Archives: books: the quiet twin

The Crooked Maid

fiction May 14, 2017 Leave a comment

How did I stumble across The Crooked Maid? I don’t remember exactly what I was doing but I think I was looking up something about The Quiet Twin, and found it on author Dan Vyleta’s website.

I had no idea that Vyleta had revisited Vienna, this time after the war in 1948, and bought the book immediately. It was the ebook version too, so it was near instant gratification. I started reading it that day.

The Crooked Maid isn’t a sequel to The Quiet Twin, exactly, but it does revisit some of the same places and characters. Anna Beer, wife of Dr. Anton Beer, who we met in the previous novel, is back in Vienna after separating from Beer before the war, but when she arrives back at the apartment she shared with her husband, he is nowhere to be found and in his place is a large stranger, Karel Neumann, who claimed to know Beer during the war.

Anna seems to be something of a fading femme fatale; the kind of woman men can’t resist but whose beauty, while still formidable, is beginning to fade with age. She’s smart and street saavy and quite capable of taking care of herself. Overall, she’s my favorite female character in both books.

Robert Seidel, whose first encounter with Anna opens the novel, is on his way home from boarding school to see his family when his stepfather is hospitalized after mysteriously falling out a window. When he dies, Robert’s brother, Wolfgang, a former SS officer, is charged in his death.

Eva, the hunchback maid of the title and working for the wealthy Seidels, is also interested in finding Dr. Beer.

And Vienna is working desperately at denazification, trying to purge itself of signs of its dark past, and convince the world, and itself, that it was a reluctant participant to the horrors of the Nazi regime rather than its willing cohort.

Unlike The Quiet Twin, there were likable characters in this book and the ending wasn’t nearly as bitter, although things didn’t work out quite the way I wanted them to. Ok, they worked out nothing like I wanted them to, but I guess that’s good right? I always complain about books and movies where I figure out the ending. Why should this be any different?

I did figure out Dr. Beer’s fate early on, though. I still liked the story, and getting to that point though, so that’s a plus.

As with the The Quiet Twin, I highly recommend The Crooked Maid. It can be slow in spots but gets better and better as it goes on and was a contender for my favorite book of 2016.

As a side note for anyone considering picking up the book, you don’t have to read The Quiet Twin before you read The Crooked Maid, but I recommend it. You will pick up a lot of extra info that makes finding little Easter eggs in The Crooked Maid more enjoyable.

The Quiet Twin

fiction, history, suspense / thriller March 16, 2016 Leave a comment

I’m starting this post with a plug.

I bought The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta at The Mysterious Bookshop at 58 Warren St. in New York City. I looooove The Mysterious Bookshop. I have a soft spot for independent bookstores and The Mysterious Bookshop is definitely one of my favorites.

The cozy one room store is floor to 12? 15? foot ceiling wooden bookshelves and tables, at least half the back wall is dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, but the rest of the store is full of mysteries and thrillers from all over the world. The green carpet is dated and so is the oversized furniture,  and while many books are new some of the books are used, but it’s extremely easy for any mystery book lover to overlook the antiquated atmosphere and spend an hour? afternoon? day? going through everything from Victorian crime fiction to historical suspense thrillers.

…which brings me back to The Quiet Twin. The story is set in 1939, Nazi-occupied Vienna, in an apartment complex with an inner courtyard. A series of murders have taken place through the city and when Professor Speckstein’s dog ends up murdered as well, he wants to know who did it and why. He enlists the help of Dr. Beer, a physician who lives in the building. Before long, Dr. Beer is in the bedroom of Professor Speckstein’s teenage niece, Zuzka, who is not obviously ill but insists on seeing him. She shows the doctor the oddities of their neighbors she has learned just by watching them through their windows.

By the way, Professor Speckstein is the neighborhood Zellenleiter, an informant for the Nazi party. He’s also a sex offender.

There are a lot of characters in this story, and each one has any number of things to hide.

I kept waiting for the twin to show up, but it becomes obvious, as you read the story, that the twin Vyleta is referring to is the side of ourselves that nobody sees, the secrets we hide from the world, “The Stranger” as Billy Joel would call it.

In this book, Vyleta focuses on what happens to ordinary people when they live in an atmosphere of constant paranoia, and suspicion, where they are constantly being spied on. While the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots of the world commit the greatest atrocities, how do regular, usually peaceful people become insidiously complicit? Vyleta seems to suggest they’re petty crimes of opportunity: small betrayals that we may overlook, or may not even remember that we commit, in an effort to secure our own safety.

In retrospect, it is easy to condemn the action and non-action of the populations of Germany and the rest of Europe during the second World War. It’s easy to say now that we would never get caught up in something so violent, that we would condemn something so horrific, that we’d never inform on our neighbors and friends in an attempt to protect ourselves. But would we? Vyleta explores this, and its consequences throughout the story.

A couple of things:

1] The ending is horrifically unsatisfying and bitter. I’ve just found out that there is a sequel, so I’m about to go buy that, but I’m a little nervous that it’s going to be even more unsatisfying than this one.

2] There aren’t many characters to like. In fact, of all of them, I think I liked only two. Don’t get me wrong: I found the characters interesting, I just didn’t particularly like them. Vyleta does some of this on purpose, I’m sure.

3] It can be a bit of a slow read. The atmosphere is tense, but there are long stretches where you just want to speed it up a bit. I found that to be the case anyway.

Overall, though, The Quiet Twin is by far the best book I read in 2015. Suspenseful, disturbing, and a fascinatingly introspective look into human nature during a time where everyone’s actions had the potential to be touched by the creeping evil of Nazi culture, I highly recommend it.