Martin Suter

Charity, die ins 21. Jahrhundert versprengte Raumpilotin der Space Force, ist am Ende eines langen Weges angekommen. Gegen alle Hoffnung nahm sie den Kampf gegen die außerirdischen Besatzer der Erde auf. Und sie hat sie aus ihrem Sonnensystem vertrieben - beinahe jedenfalls. Nur aus der dunklen Seite des Mondes halten die Aliens eine letzte Stellung. In ein rätselhaftes Labyrinth aus Minen und Schächten hat sich Shait, der Herr der Moroni, zurückgezogen, und er rüstet sich zur alles entscheidenden Schlacht gegen Charity und ihre Gefährten.

"Adrian Weynfeldt is an art expert in an international auction house, a bachelor in his mid-fifties living in a grand Zurich apartment filled with costly paintings and antiques. Always correct and well-mannered, he's given up on love until one night -- entirely out of character for him -- Weynfeldt decides to take home a ravishing but unaccountable young woman. The next morning, he finds her outside on his balcony threatening to jump. Weynfeldt talks her down and soon finds himself falling for this damaged but alluring beauty and his buttoned up existence comes unraveled. As their two lives become entangled, Weynfeldt gets embroiled in an art forgery scheme that threatens to destroy everything he and his prominent family have stood for. This refined page-turner moves behind elegant bourgeois facades into darker recesses of the heart."--provided from Amazon.com

287 pages ; 20 cm

"A thrilling art heist escapade infused with European high culture and luxury that doesn't shy away from the darker side of human nature. Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune by living in Old World grandeur despite present-day financial constraints. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand. Allmen's fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five Art Nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Emile Galle and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, pressured to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in. This is the first of a series of humorous, fast-paced detective novels devoted to a memorable gentleman thief who, with his trusted sidekick Carlos, creates an investigative firm to recover missing precious objects."--provided by Amazon.com.

As the financial crisis tightens its grip on Europe, the gilded world of Zurich's leading restaurant, Chez Huwyler, seems immune to plunging stock markets and collapsing banks. But behind the scenes, even the rarefied world of haute cuisine is feeling the bite and so Maravan - a Tamil dishwasher and undiscovered culinary genius - and Andrea - a stunningly beautiful waitress - find themselves out of a job and needing to find another way to survive. After Maravan seduces Andrea by cooking her a dinner that fuses the aphrodisiac recipes of his ancestors with the necromancy of molecular gastronomy, Andrea hits upon a business idea: romantic catering for couples. But even culinary magic can't ward off recession and when their new company begins to struggle, they are forced to enter into a much more unsavoury business, plunging them deep into an underworld where murder and sex feed otherwise unquenchable thirsts ...

Was ist das Schlimmste für einen Manager? Kein Bonus. Das Zweitschlimmste? Ferien. Zur Untätigkeit gezwungen zu sein. Zu wissen: Die Firma wird untergehen, weil er nicht da ist. Oder, noch schlimmer: Die Firma wird nicht untergehen, obwohl er nicht da ist. Am allerschlimmsten: Die Firma wird wachsen und gedeihen, gerade weil er nicht da ist. Was bleibt dem Manager? Die Ferien managen oder die eigene Familie oder das Hotelpersonal, bis allen der Kragen platzt. Oder einen Weg finden, nicht in die Ferien zu fahren.

Does time exist? You think this is an absurd question? Think again. How do we measure time? The answer is: we can't. We only measure physical changes that occured. But this means that what we thought were past, isn't. We can come back to a previous state by simply rolling back every change that has been made since. And your dead wife will come back to life if your house looks exactly like it did a day before she died. Peter Taler's neighbour Knupp is sure about that. Perhaps this certainty is the only thing that keeps him alive. Perhaps for Taler it is too.

"At first they thought Konrad's absentmindedness was due to his drinking. For years, he had been a benign parasite on the Koch family. But when their villa burns down because of Konrad's forgetfulness, Elvira Senn, matriarch of the Koch family, puts him on a strict regime. No longer allowed his daily tipple, Konrad recovers and even falls in love. But then his condition deteriorates, and Alzheimer's takes hold. As he loses his present, he regains his distant past, and this is what Elvira fears the most. As they wait for him to rewind to the crucial moment, his life is in danger from far more than a debilitating disease."--Amazon.com.

This tightly plotted, extremely well written novel is an acute study of the shifting nature of identity and reality, as well as an engrossing mystery story with a shocking twist.