A Deal With the Devil by Martin Suter

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY PETER MILLAR

WINNER OF THE FRIEDRICH-GLAUSER PRIZE FOR BEST NEW CRIME NOVEL SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA DUNCAN LAWRIE INTERNATIONAL DAGGER 2008

'In the middle of the night she woke up with her heart pounding. Some noise must  have wakened her, perhaps the church bell, chiming the quarter hour distance. Or maybe it was someone else who couldn't sleep. In an old building like this you heard every step. She held her breath and listened...'

Sonia Freay fears for her sanity. Her marriage ended in divorce after her husband tried to kill her. And a bad acid trip has heightened her senses - she can now 'feel' smells, 'see' sounds. To escape these worries, she takes a job as a physio at a newly re-opened hotel in a remote Alpine village in the Swiss Engadine. There, a series of disturbing events throws her into disarray once more. Sonia soon discovers a parallel to these occurrences in local folk tales of the supernatural - can the legend of the Devil of Milan be true? Or is the truth more sinister? Sonia's mind, already under pressure from her strange, almost extrasensory awareness, is stretched to breaking point by the climate of paranoia developing around her. And when her ex-mother-in-law arrives as a guest at the hotel, preceded by the horrific death in a car crash of one of the locals, she understands that all is not as it should be.

This tightly-plotted novel, in the tradition of Fred Vargas, is an acute study of the shifting nature and identity and reality.