List (Ullstein Buchverlage), August 2007, 416pp.
ISBN: 978 347 1795538
Author&Rights

Die siebte Stunde is Elisabeth Herrmann’s second thriller, and a real page-turner to boot. Her first introduced us to Berlin lawyers Joachim Vernau and Marie-Luise Hoffmann, and here they are again, once more drawn into a mysterious chain of events that will require all their cunning and skill to avert the worst.

On the verge of bankruptcy Vernau is tempted by Hoffman into accepting the offer of a teaching post at a private school in the smart suburb of Pankow, managed by her adroit friend Katharina Oettinger. His brief is to take over the supervision of a cutting-edge ‘Teen Court’ experiment, where the pupils themselves decide in mock court hearings how breaches of the school rules should be tried and punished. But thrown in at the deep end he quickly discovers that all is not as it seems, and that his class of teenagers are all petrified by strange events they will not talk about. Clearly the situation is linked to the apparent suicide of Klarissa, a classmate who died at the end of the previous school year, and a bizarre ‘Live Action Role Playing’ game (LARP) that they are all engaged in. Far from mere childhood misdemeanours, it seems that pure evil is afoot. As Vernau’s pupils begin to the singled out and bumped off and the school fails to tackle the obvious threats head-on, he and Hoffmann take frantic steps to isolate the murderer in their midst. Vernau’s probing even sucks him into the world of LARP vampires and the Turkish mafia, thereby adding some surprising insights into modern Berlin’s zeitgeist.

Here is a new crime-writer fairly teeming with originality. How much did you know about Live Action Role Playing before seeing it mentioned in this review? Elizabeth Herrmann is just the person to fill you in. Her narrative style is lively, witty and fluid, her descriptive ability is plain to see, and her choice of a lawyer-duo rather than police detectives as her principal characters enables her to dispense with the sometimes wearisome forensics of the more conventional form. A hit, a very palpable hit, which could leave us all longing for more.
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Application for assistance with translation costs – Germany

Translation rights available from:
Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH
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E-mail: susanna.schaefer@ullsteinbuchverlage.de 
Contact: Susanna Schaefer

List was founded in 1894 in Berlin and focuses on upmarket commercial fiction. In the early years of the 20th century, List was successful in publishing works such as the autobiography of Alfred Nobel, Winston Churchill’s The Early Years, T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele. List published Nobel laureates Knut Hamsun, Rudyard Kipling and Mikhail Solokhov, along with André Maurois, Arnold Toynbee and Stefan Heym. More recent bestsellers include Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, The Mission Song by John le Carré and the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer. In 2003 List was acquired by the Swedish media company Bonnier and moved to Berlin as part of the Ullstein publishing group.