Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge - Softcover

Patricia Duncker is the author of the novels Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize), The Deadly Space Between, and The Doctor, as well as collections of short stories and essays. Her work has been shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.

A mass suicide (or "Departure") of a secret cult's adherents discovered in a French forest on New Year's Day, laid out in a fan shape in the snow, at the start of this haunting novel from British author Duncker (Hallucinating Foucault), resembles a larger Departure years earlier, in Switzerland. Looking into both cases are Dominique Carpentiera, a "judge," or investigator, in the French court system, and André Schweigen, a commissaire, or police officer with judicial powers. Complicating matters is the nearly obsessive love that Andre holds for the beautiful and idiosyncratic Dominique. Delving into the history of the cult, Dominique travels extensively, including back to her own roots among the vineyards of France. Along the way she comes to realize that at the center of her search is an ancient book full of strange code and a brilliant German composer named Friedrich Grosz. Though the leisurely plot gets progressively flakier and the personal dynamics a bit tiresome, the prose remains vibrant.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.