The Case of the Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study, and Other Stories

A pastor is missing, there is blood on his study floor and no body, and the village has already decided who did it. Joseph Muller — small, shabby, apologetic, and the best detective in the Vienna police — thinks otherwise. Groner was an Austrian schoolteacher who invented the first professional detective in German fiction; Muller's weakness is that he keeps feeling sorry for the people he catches. Fifty-six plates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, from Munch to Waldmüller, trace the shadowed interiors, streets and faces that give these Viennese cases their uneasy light.