“Jones vividly evokes 1900 Vienna . . . in his splendid third whodunit featuring attorney Karl Werthen and criminologist Hanns Gross.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Vienna, 1900. Lawyer Karl Werthen is puzzling over the suicide of a local councilman when he is assigned by Karl Wittgenstein, a powerful industrialist with many enemies, to find his recently missing son, Hans. Werthen quickly discovers that the young man appears to be alive and well in another country. But when a friend of Hans—a journalist who wrote a number of articles claiming the councilman who committed suicide was corrupt—is found dead, also from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Werthen fears that sinister forces are at work . . .
“[Jones uses] mystery fiction to resurrect beautiful, historic Vienna.” —Kirkus Reviews
J. Sydney Jones (b. 1948) is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in the United States, he studied abroad in Vienna in 1968 and later returned to Austria to live there for nearly two decades. In the late 1970s he began writing travel books, many of which concern central Europe, and published his first thriller, Time of the Wolf, in 1990. In 2009 Jones published The Empty Mirror, a mystery set in late-nineteenth-century Vienna that would become the first book in his Viennese Mystery series, of which the most recent installment is The Keeper of Hands (2013). Jones lives with his wife and son in California.