Wanting a change from heavy topics like trials and concentration camps, I turned to Melanie Raabe's 2016 novel Die Wahrheit (literally The Truth, but published in English as The Stranger Upstairs).

It's billed as a "thriller", and though it is not a shoot-'em-up-type thriller (thank goodness), it really is a page-turner. (What is the electronic equivalent of that, I wonder... Screen-tapper, maybe?) In fact, the novel's construction is an object lesson in how to suck the reader in, lead her off down numerous blind alleys, and make her gallop through the chapters in the quest to know what happens next.

The basic scenario (no secrets exposed here, as this is all in the publisher's blurb) is that Sarah's rich businessman husband, Philipp, left their comfortable home in Hamburg in 2008 to go on a business trip to Colombia, and disappeared (he was assumed to have been kidnapped, although no ransom note ever appears). For seven years, she has had to get on with her life -- doing her job, looking after her small son and the big old family house that her husband brought to the marriage, training for sports events -- and she has reached the point where she is ready to move on. Then there's the phone call.  Philipp is alive, and he's on his way home. Such a development would be hard to handle at the best of times, but there's an additional complication: when she arrives at the airport to meet him, in the midst of a blaze of media interest, the man who gets off the plane is a stranger. What's more, he rapidly makes clear that if she goes to the police, she will lose everything: her husband, her child, and her apparently perfect life.


Not the Elbe... Another river in 2008. The Murray, actually

So, as I said, it canters along very nicely. And aside from the tense, looming thriller-aspects, it's quite atmospheric: the leafy Hamburg suburb where their house is located, the stupefying summer heat, the relentlessly beige-and-cream decor that Sarah inherited from her mother-in-law, the big garden, the city streets at night, the underground, the Elbe...

On the downside, I found the way it switched genres a little disconcerting. From dark and menacing thriller (albeit with strong psychological overtones), it became, as piece after piece of backstory is revealed, more overtly the study of a marriage that was disintegrating well before Philipp disappeared. 

And I didn't find the ending very credible... 

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book, and would probably take a chance with another by the same author. 

And as a little introduction to the vocabulary of electronic equipment (we didn't have laptops and mobile phones back when I was living, studying, and working in Germany), it's unparalleled...