Akif Pirinçci Der eine ist stumm, der andere ein Blinder (One Is Mute, The Other Blind) Rotbuch Verlag, March 2006, 412 pp ISBN: 3-434-53146-7 Take Agatha Christie or, if you prefer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and lace their techniques and subject matter with the grisly imaginings of the Marquis de Sade. You will then get some idea of the substance of this gripping and well-crafted thriller, which concerns the kidnapping of twelve five-year-old children several of whom, when their bodies are discovered, are found to have been whipped to death, then posed with their arms folded and their faces set in a grotesquely angelic smile. How do the two detectives, Hugo Hoffer and his partner Richard Claudius, set about finding the killer and rescuing those children who have not yet suffered this fate? Good luck enters into it - for instance when one of the detectives, in the course of an online computer game, comes across a user whose diaries provide vital clues. Another breakthrough, via a chance encounter in a bar, reveals the location of an old mine shaft where the surviving children are being kept. We will not give away the identity of the murderer, or whether this sadist is a he or a she. Read on and find out - if you have the stomach for it, that is. There is some gruesome, disturbing stuff here.