- Steven Carroll has long been one of my favourite Australian novelists. He's a gentle, intelligent, sensitive writer, and an explorer of love and relationships in all their dimensions.
- In this new novel he delves into the genre of crime fiction, introducing us to Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, an Austrian-born cockney Jew. The year is 1947, and the locale Cambridge University. His parents were interred by the British government during the war and did not survive.
- A cyclist has been hit by a speeding car at an intersection and dies. He was the highly celebrated philosopher Martin Friedrich who was on his way to the university to give a lecture. He was German and prior to the war a supporter of Hitler and his Nazi vision of German ‘liberation’. He was short, fat and self-entitled, but he brought a European sensibility to the harsh, desiccated rationality of the Wittgenstein-obsessed culture of Cambridge. ‘…an old man, short and stocky, face like a storybook animal, a badger stuffed into tweeds’. He was 'a mixture of Heidegger and Sartre, with a dash of Camus’. To him, and his many student fans, his Existentialism was like being released from Plato’s cave, into reality, not shadows and illusions.
- Carroll introduces us to three young women, two of whom had affairs with Friedrich although he was thirty or so years older than them. One of them, Daisy, was only nineteen. Tragically, she got pregnant and had an abortion which killed her.
- Two other characters are men who the detective believes are suspects in the hit and run. One, an older man, politically powerful and upper class, and the other a young spiv. All of his characters have backgrounds and secrets which are richly explored.
- Carroll brings the story to a very satisfying end. He leaves us with the question: is the universe really empty of justice and godly intervention? He has written a magnificent novel, the first in a possible series.
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