Martin Grzimek Das Austernfest The Oyster Festival marebuchverlag GmbH & Co KG, October 2004, 203 pp. ISBN 3- 936384-16-9 Männe is a cartoonist who has worked for the same newspaper all his life. Iris is a lady he met when she joined the paper on work experience. He wanted to marry her. She refused him. Both married other people and then got divorced. But at seventy Männe, the narrator of this complex, tortuous and totally fascinating thriller, still thinks she will come to love him because she will finally need him. The heart of the action is reached when Männe inherits a flat in the small but famous French oyster-farming town of Arcachon and misguidedly allows Iris to stay there by herself. He discovers that she has fallen in love with a French regional parliamentarian called Jean-Pierre Fouché and has started sleeping with him. He sets out to spy on them. His base, since he can no longer use his own flat, is with Vincent, an oyster-catcher, and his wife and daughter. Vincent takes him out to the oyster farm one morning and Männe, as an artist, is overawed by the absurdly beautiful oyster farm ‘landscape’ that opens up in front of him as the day breaks and the tide goes out. Through Vincent he gets more information about Fouché, including the fact that latter’s wife is having an affair with another oyster farmer called Jean-Claude. At the time Männe starts his narration these events have happened several years ago, a device that adds increasingly to the tension and suspense of the storyline. The reader learns that Fouché eventually proposes to Iris, promising to leave his wife and children on her account. Then he jilts her. They have a violent altercation, ending in blows, at the annual oyster festival. She drives back to Germany where, to her horror, she is arrested on suspicion of his murder. Then Jean-Claude’s wife is also found dead. Her husband admits to this crime. But who killed Fouché? Or was Männe behind the whole thing? The reader is left deliberately in limbo as the narrator leads him on, only to be faced with the tantalising words: ‘That’s how it was or that’s how it might have been’. ‘Flawless as a pearl’ was one German newspaper’s verdict on this book, which contains more than a touch of Patricia Highsmith. British publishers take note!