“A missing child. A desperate father. A monster with a terrible secret”
- Book: The Inmate
- Location: Berlin
- Author: Sebastian Fitzek
Author Sebastian Fitzek was already right up there near the top of my list, as master of the twisted psychological thriller. However, with this storyline, he ramped things up another notch and took the genre to a whole new level for me!
To reveal too much of the premise, would be to offer up far more spoilers than necessary – besides which, I’m not sure how to go about describing what I have just experienced to myself, let alone a wider audience. You really need to immerse yourself in the book and it won’t be long before you too, will lose all sense of time, place, reality and more importantly, self!
Think ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ and you’re only just beginning to scratch the surface..
…
Guido Tramnitz, a disgraced former intensive care neo natal nurse, is arrested and convicted of several very unorthodox abductions and murders that he has confessed to, including at least two children and he is now incarcerated in a Berlin, high security prison psychiatric hospital.
Till Berkhoff is a good firefighter, but has a very short fuse if members of the public stop him from doing his job the way he sees fit. Following one altercation too many and because of his medical training, he has recently been demoted to paramedic status. Till is married to Ricarda and they have two children, six year old Max and baby Emilia. When, against Ricarda’s strict instructions, daddy’s boy Max is allowed to leave the house alone to visit a neighbour and is subsequently never seen again, Ricarda cannot live either with herself, or Till, and leaves the marital home taking Emilia with her. It is assumed by the police that Max was another of Tramnitz’s victims, so when after an agonisingly long year, the prisoner inexplicably continues to maintain his silence about the whereabouts of the boy’s body, the case is closed, much to Till’s distress. Desperate to find closure, mourn the loss of his son and move on with his life, Till approaches Ricarda’s brother Oliver, a police officer, for help. He wants Oliver to provide him with a new identity and background which will get him admitted to the same institution as Tramnitz, where he hopes to get close enough to his prey, to illicit the information he seeks.
Patrick Winter, deceased, is the alias that Oliver chooses for Till to adopt. A husband and father of two, Patrick’s wife Linda and daughter Frieda, left him after he inadvertently caused the death of his young son Jonas, in the most terrible of accidents. Losing all sense of reality, a distraught Patrick can see Jonas’s kindergarten from his house and in the final act of a desperate man who cannot live with what he has done, pours lighter fluid over himself, walks into a parent/teacher evening at the kindergarten and dies after setting himself alight.
Till realises after just a few short hours, which to him seem like a lifetime, that life in the hospital is not at all what he expected. The patients seem to be running the institution, whilst the medical staff, many of whom are clearly not fit to hold their positions, profit at the inmates expense by providing all those extra deviant little luxuries and indulgencies which have often been the reason for their incarceration in the first place. Director Sanger seems blissfully unaware that many members of her team belong behind the units closed doors, rather than indulging in life on the outside.
How much danger is Till/Winter going to face in his quest to get to the truth?
But remember; nothing is as it seems and no one is to be trusted!!!
…
Thankfully, this well-structured, highly textured, sinister and atmospherically charged storyline, was broken down into bite-sized, well-signposted chapters, which left me in no doubt, despite the ever-changing perspectives, where I was and to whom I was listening…. However, for me those assumptions it transpired were only reality in my dreams, or rather my nightmares and at no time was I ever really in control of my thoughts about what I was reading!!
That the writing is fast-paced, dark, violent, vivid and graphic, is beyond doubt for any readers who are particularly squeamish and I quite surprised myself that I didn’t feel the slightest urge to skip any pages, but that was possibly only because I was frightened of missing some vital snippet of important information concealed in the compulsive dialogue and narrative. It is also written with a palpable sense of urgency, which raises the stakes exponentially with each new chapter. I was constantly on the edge of my seat, unintentionally holding my breath, as many secrets and even more lies, were fed into the storyline, one agonising drip at a time, drawing out and ratcheting up the addictive suspense and tension almost to breaking point. Just when I thought I had worked out the many additional strands to this story, another curved ball was thrown into the mix, with that eventual dovetailing not finally happening until almost the final agonising scene of this mind-bending, rollercoaster ride, although I just knew from the start, that there could only be a terribly horrific, twisted ending that I wasn’t going to see coming – and I wasn’t to be disappointed.
The well drawn and authenticated characters divided themselves quite nicely into two separate camps; those who were victims of their failure to cope with life on the outside; and those who sought to turn and manipulate the weaknesses of the more vulnerable to their own advantage. They were all however, equally distant and unconnected and I was neither surprised nor particularly concerned, that I didn’t need or want, to invest in any of them. Even Tramnitz’s reminiscenses and recriminations about his childhood experiences, whilst explaining some of his own wantonly sadistic and perverted adult behaviour, failed to persuade me that he was anything but a manipulative and malevolent force of evil, with nothing but deadly intent on his mind.
The only small niggle for me personally, is that, although I knew the story was set in Berlin, that was as much as was revealed. This storyline was all about the characters, their relationships to one another, the events which had drawn them together, and which were destined to rip them apart, so location was never really going to be a dominating factor. The physical footprint is almost exclusively limited to the two houses of the protagonists and the inside of the prison psychiatric hospital. This definitely isn’t one for any avid armchair travellers, or sites which recommend books based on location. However, not to include it in those catalogues would be a crying shame, as for what it is worth, author Sebastian Fitzek is a consummate weaver of words and did use the full palette at his disposal to describe the medical surroundings in graphic detail, which as I already suffer from ‘white coat syndrome’, did me no favours at all, but I simply couldn’t look away – and neither should you, not until the final page is turned and the final toss of the dice is made!!
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