Bittere Delikatessen - Bitter Delicacies

236 pages, published by Grafit, Dortmund, in 1996

Benedikt Engel, a 37-year-old superintendent, investigates a case of a serial homicide. The first victim is a well-known businessman and the suspect is Nora, his daughter. Nora is a famous actress who lived abroad and came back to Düsseldorf to play a role in a TV-serial. Engel finds out that she was abused by her father when she was a child and is now the care of a psychiatrist. He sympathizes with her, because he was maltreated when he was a boy, too. Engel is so much attracted by Nora that he offers to flee with her to South America. But she insists on her innocence and rejects his offer.
A second man gets killed and police find old photographs of the two victims and a third man raping young Nora. Engel is quite sure that Nora is the murderer, but she surprisingly tells him that her colleague Max killed the men to revenge the old crime and to blackmail Nora into consenting to marry him. According to Nora, Max, actor in the same soap opera, is obviously mad.
When the third man on the photographs is found dead, Engel knows that he has to find the man who took the pictures. With this mans help he plans to set a trap for the killer - Nora or Max …

The novel has been translated into Czech language.

Read what the press writes about Horst Eckert´s novels.

"Nothing is what it seems to be. Eckert lets the reader take breath to take the breath at the next moment. He is close to his characters who step out of the pages with physical presence."
(Bergsträßer Anzeiger)