The Rescuer
What secrets do the heroes of the sea carry with them?
In Deen’s sublime third Wadden Sea thriller, a mystery unfolds against a spectacular backdrop. The psychological depth and literary brilliance of Deen’s works are reminiscent of the great Scandinavian authors in the genre. longside the murder case – below the surface of the water, if you will – he constructs a riveting psychological drama.
Like other legendary fictional detectives, Liewe Cupido is a man of few words. It’s not just about keeping his cards close to his chest – he’d rather keep quiet about painful things, even to himself. That has everything to do with the skeletons from his own closet, especially his father’s mysterious death by drowning when Cupido was a teenager, which left him bereft and adrift – and which he still feels a sense of guilt about.
The Rescuer is about a cold case: a body is found off the coast of Britain, a tugboat captain who went missing twenty years earlier after a shipwreck that drew both German and Dutch rescue services. At the time, neither were able to bring him home. The ingredients of the story are vintage Deen: the legal no man’s land of the Wadden Islands (Cupido is with the German police, yet grew up on the Dutch island of Texel) and the stunning descriptions of this harsh, stormy landscape, which make the reader yearn to be out there, at the mercy of the elements.
Deen reveals how this decades-old murder turns people’s lives upside down – especially within the community of gruff rescue workers on the German island of Norderney. Cupido is assisted by young detective Xander Rimbach, who combines a disarming insecurity with a remarkable intuition.
The Rescuer is a story about pride, poison, grief, parenthood and faith. The mounting suspense reaches fever pitch when Michael Waagmann appears on the scene, an old rescue worker who turns out to be extremely manipulative. The book culminates in a gripping finale that shakes even the unflappable Cupido to his core.
Rights
Mare Verlag
Schultze-Kossack Agency
On behalf of Mare Verlag
Annette Wolf
annette.wolf@mp-litagency.com
“As usual, Deen’s narrative voice is assured and wide-ranging, deftly alternating perspectives without being overly fixated on his detective protagonist, with a keen sense of the idiosyncrasies of the Frisian world between Texel and Flensburg.”
“A lot of crime fiction also makes some kind of statement about the society in which the crimes are being committed. But few authors manage to be as subtle and non-didactic about it as Mathijs Deen in this book.”
“A unique contribution to the Dutch thriller genre – one made by a journalist who never would have ventured into writing crime fiction if it hadn’t been for his German publisher twisting his arm.”
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