Review: What really happened – one fact, two stories

The supermarket’s security guard, Jim Doyle, makes a routine tour of the store and discovers a bestseller: “The Nothing Man” is the store’s name. He doesn’t usually read, but he can’t leave this book. “Every story has three sides, as they say: yours, my story, and the truth,” writes Eve Black at the beginning. Yes, and the fact has a lot to do with the fact of the security guard, which is not particularly popular among his colleagues. Because in Yves Black’s book his story is told. He was the no-nonsense guy who committed gruesome murders over 20 years ago. He thinks no one knows about it. A whole series of unimaginable atrocities were committed, but the man was not caught. He now lives a petite bourgeois everyday life, has a wife and daughter, and is hiding behind his job as a security guard. But now what he thinks is buried is catching up with him.

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Is this the whole truth?

Eve Black lost her family – father, mother and little sister – 20 years ago when Jim Doyle broke into her home and did his own brutal act. She was 12 years old and accidentally ran for her life, but her family is not the only one among the victims. Eve Black recounts Doyle’s meticulously detailed history of horror – in her bestselling crime book, where she not only tells her point of view, but also collects everything that has become known about the perpetrator thus far. As Doyle reads everything in his path, he angrily realizes that Eve Black has set him on the right track. His truth, which he successfully concealed for many years, threatens to become public because its truth is read everywhere. But does Eve Black’s vision of things bring the whole truth to the negotiating table? Or was everything a little different than it seems?

A book within a book – sexy

Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard is adept at picking threads and pulling them together. A special stylistic device helps with this, as reader Jim Doyle flips through Eve Black’s book and goes along with what he’s reading. So you have two books in one book. Both the thriller itself and the book in the book have the same title, both have dedications, ISBNs, acknowledgments, etc. Playing with the Perspective of Things – Eve Black’s Book is not just a review and analysis of offenders, it is catching tension back hard up. An unforgettable reading experience the author brings from Dublin. The Nothing Man, a hit in the author’s homeland, is by no means Katherine Ryan Howard’s first novel. According to the publisher, it was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel, among other things.

The man of nowhere. Two stories. killer. Ruthless, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Hamburg, 2011, 396 pages, €12.