The Pharmacist - Tapa blanda

‘Germany’s Queen of Crime’
Observer

‘A first-rate example of the Eurocrime novel that focuses on the internal lives of its characters’
Val McDermid [of Hell Hath No Fury]

A gripping psychological mystery from one of Europe’s best-selling crime novelists.

Would you confide in a woman you didn’t know, confess the intimate details of your life? Hella Moormann finds herself doing just this with Rosemarie Hirte, the unknown, unprepossessing woman in the next bed at Heidelberg Hospital for Women.

Hella Moormann has always suffered from a need to nurture lost souls. In childhood, the consequences are harmless, but as an adult the fostering of a series of hopeless men is naturally more disastrous... until, that is, she meets the beautiful Levin, a young dental student who is the heir to his rich grandfather. Hella, herself a pharmacist, is delighted – momentarily forgetting her unerring ability to choose the wrong man.

Soon, though, Levin is taking an unhealthy interest in some old poison bottles Hella has inherited, and planning to use his dental skills in a macabre way. Hella, apparently against her will, finds that her life is taking an increasingly bizarre course, from involvement with drugs runners to murder, via adultery and much else. But how innocent is she of all this? Is she the helpless victim of fate or a cunning manipulator of events?

Since she is narrating the story, she can slant it as she wishes; but in choosing the anonymous Rosemarie Hirte as her confidante she may have made the greatest mistake of her life, for Hirte has a sinister secret life of her own...