Book description
Vienna, 1903. In St. Florian's military school, a rambling edifice
set high in the hills of the City's famous woods, a young cadet is
found dead - his body lacerated with razor wounds. Once again,
Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt calls on his friend - and disciple of Freud
- Doctor Max Liebermann, to help him with the investigation.
In the closed society of the school, power is everything - and
suspicion falls on an elite group of cadets, with a penchant for
sadism and dangerous games. When it is discovered that the dead boy
was a frequent guest of the deputy headmaster's attractive young wife
- other motives for murder suggest themselves.
A tangled web of relationships is uncovered, at the heart of which
are St. Florian's dark secrets, which Liebermann, using new
psychoanalytic tools such as dream interpretation and the ink-blot
test, begins to probe. At the same time, a shocking revelation makes
it impossible for Liebermann to pursue the object of his affections,
the Englishwoman Miss Lydgate, and he finds himself romantically
involved with the passionate and elemental Trezska Novak - a
mysterious Hungarian concert violinist, gifted with uncannily accurate
intuitions. Again, all is not what it seems, and Liebermann is drawn
into the perilous world of espionage - and must make choices, the
outcome of which will threaten the entire stability of the Habsburg
Empire.
Fatal Lies - volume three of the Liebermann Papers - is about
sex, the will to power, and deception.
Frank Tallis is a writer and practising clinical psychologist. He has
published seven non-fiction books (including
Changing Minds
:
The History of Psychotherapy as an Answer to Human Suffering
and
Hidden Minds
:
A History of the Unconscious
). He has also written two novels;
Killing Time
and
Sensing Others
, both published by Penguin. In 1999 he received a Writers' Award from
the Arts Council of Great Britain and in 2000 he won the New London
Writers' Award (London Arts Board). He lives and works in London.
