The Luzern Photograph

November 16, 2015
Three narratives propel Bayer’s crafty whodunit. In the present, performance artist Tess Berenson has just moved into an Oakland, Calif., apartment that was previously occupied by a professional dominatrix, Chantal Desforges. Tess, who realizes she met Chantal at a kickboxing class, is hit hard when she learns the woman was murdered. In 1912, a strange man displays an obsessive interest in Lou Andreas-Salomé, a prominent intellectual, who numbers both Nietzsche and Rilke among her romantic conquests
and who has come to Vienna to study with Freud. Her pursuer became interested in Lou after learning of the eponymous photo, taken in 1882, in which she posed with two men—one of them Nietzsche—harnessed to a cart as if they were animals. Extracts from the unpublished memoirs of Maj. Ernst Fleckstein, a Nazi fixer, who crosses paths with Lou in the 1930s, add another layer to the puzzle. Bayer (Blind Side) keeps the suspense high as he artfully toggles among story lines and thoughtfully develops his characters. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management Literary Agency.

January 1, 2016

In 1882 in Luzern, Switzerland, a strange photograph is taken, showing a woman with a whip in her hand and two men pulling a cart in front of her. In Vienna, in 1912, Madame Lou Andreas-Salome meets an unimpressive young man who has drawn a copy of this photograph. This man is Adolf Hitler. She informs him he has no talent as an artist. Madame is a noted intellectual, now studying with Sigmund Freud, who is a Jew. In present-day Oakland, CA, a woman is murdered. Her apartment is rented by performance artist Tess Berenson who discovers a link between the photograph and Hitler's drawing. The time line moves between Vienna and Oakland as the plot unfolds and melds the two narratives. VERDICT In this clever psychological thriller, Bayer (Switch; Mirror Maze) chillingly and skillfully depicts the divide between good and evil. Suggest to Thomas Harris and Michael Connelly devotees.

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