Michael Aldrian, a retired Viennese opera prompter, travels to Venice to visit his brother and sister-in-law for the holidays, but they seem to have disappeared without a trace. Intending to write a travel guide to Venice, Aldrian heads out into the flooded city. But he is subsequently followed, threatened, and attacked. He then receives a package of Italian lira, presumably as a bribe. The police advise him to return to Vienna, but he stays, hoping to solve the mysterious disappearance of the couple. Yet another package contains the hands of his brother and sister-in-law, and soon thereafter their bodies are fished out of the sea. Inexorably and almost without his complicity, he is drawn into the intrigue, more as a participant than as a spectator. As if in a nightmare, he traverses the city and kills several people who stand in his way. Has he gone crazy, or is it the world? Author Gerhard Roth was born in Graz in 1942, the son of a medical doctor and a nurse. He originally intended to study medicine, but soon discontinued his studies. For ten years Roth worked as a computer programmer to support his growing family, but since the mid-1970s he has been exclusively a writer. His major works consist of a cycle of seven novels, Die Archive des Schweigens (The Archives of Silence), and another novel cycle, Orkus (Hades). His work has earned extensive critical acclaim over the years, including the Doeblin Prize (1983), the Kreisky Prize (2002), and the Grand Austrian State Prize (2016), among many others.