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June 30, 2014
Drvenkar’s second novel (after 2011’s Sorry) opens with a man known as “The Traveler” using a 1995 snowstorm to screen to murder 26 solitary drivers stalled on a German highway in 1995. This chilling account is rendered in the second person, as is the rest of the novel. The complex plot is confusing at first, but the primary story line involves Ragnar Desche, a ruthless career criminal, who is looking to recover drugs valued at about three million euros. He has already killed his brother, Oskar, who was holding the contraband for him in Berlin—his teenage niece, Taja, eventually implicated in the crime. With the help of her “blood sisters”—Stink, Nessi, Schnappi, and Ruth—Taja tries to sell the drugs so she can find her mother in Norway. But what they find instead is Ragnar and his crew, on their tails in a violent and disturbing chase. Readers might question the narrative strategy of the second person voice, and they might wonder about how the various plotlines coalesce, but Drvenkar smartly ties everything up by the story’s end.