Staff Pick
Are you brave enough to read this novel of intense crime and horror?
In 1935, outside of Prague, is a castle that houses an asylum for the criminally insane.
With only six inmates, Dr. Kosarek desires to find the Devil Aspect.
At the same time, a serial killer stalks Prague.
A macabre and Gothic tale. Chilling! Recommended By Adrienne C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A terrifying novel set in Czechoslovakia in 1935, in which a brilliant young psychiatrist takes his new post at an asylum for the criminally insane that houses only six inmates--the country's most depraved murderers--while, in Prague, a detective struggles to understand a brutal serial killer who has spread fear through the city, and who may have ties to the asylum. In 1935, Viktor Kos rek, a psychiatrist newly trained by Carl Jung, arrives at the infamous Hrad z Orlů Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The state-of-the-art facility is located in a medieval mountaintop castle outside of Prague, though the site is infamous for concealing dark secrets going back many generations. The asylum houses the country's six most treacherous killers--known to staff as The Woodcutter, The Clown, The Glass Collector, The Vegetarian, The Sciomancer and The Demon--and Viktor hopes to use a new medical technique to prove that these patients share a common archetype of evil, a phenomenon known as "The Devil Aspect." As he begins to learn the stunning secrets of these patients, five men and one woman, Viktor must face the disturbing possibility that these six may share another dark truth.
Meanwhile, in Prague, fear grips the city as a phantom serial killer emerges in the dark alleys. Police investigator Lukas Smol k, desperate to locate the culprit (dubbed Leather Apron in the papers), realizes that the killer is imitating the most notorious serial killer from a century earlier--London's Jack the Ripper. Smol k turns to the doctors at Hrad z Orlů for their expertise with the psychotic criminal mind, though he worries that Leather Apron might have some connection to the six inmates in the asylum.
Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this stylishly written, tightly coiled, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down.