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Title: The Crooked Maid

Author: Dan Vyleta

Narrator: Kate Reading

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-26-14

Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Vienna, 1948: The war is over, and as the initial phase of denazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.

Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier upon discovering her husbands infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is 18-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfathers sickbed and the secrets of his familys past. As Anna and Robert navigate a damaged, unrecognizable city, they cross paths with a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young girl, and a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive, by any means. Meanwhile, in the shells of burned-out houses and beneath the bombed-out ruins, a ghost of a man, his head wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future deeply uncertain for all.

In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta returns to the shadows of a war-darkened Vienna, in a thrilling and atmospheric story of blame, guilt, and restitution.

Members Reviews:

Ripping yarn

Vyleta is a fine writer and this is a good book. My Wife and I have both read it and we've sent a copy to a friend deployed in Erbil. Hoping for a new book from Dan Vyleta soon.

Excellen novel of post-war Vienna

"The Crooked Maid", by Dan Vylenta, is not a particularly easy read. It is set in post-war Vienna and is the sequel to Vylenta's previous book, "The Quiet Twin". Normally I'd advise reading the first novel in a series before reading the second, but in this case, each could be stand-alone novels. While many characters continue from one book to the other, a good knowledge of the first book isn't needed to read and appreciate the second.

Vienna in 1948 was a cold, frightening place. Like Germany, Austria had been cut up into "Allied zones" after the war, but unlike Germany, Austria was finally reunited in 1955 when the four allied powers recognised an Austrian-led government. In 1948, Austrian soldiers who had been captured and held in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps were returning home. They had not been released at war's end in 1945, and, actually some Austrians were held and not released until the early 1950's. But upon returning home, these soldiers were integrated into the social system in haphazard ways. In Vylenta's novel, not only do some Austrian soldiers return to Vienna, but so do a 30ish woman - Anna Beer - and a young man she meets on the Paris/Vienna train. Both had ties to Vienna and both had lived for a few years in France. Anna was returning to see her estranged husband, Dr Anton Beer, and young Robert Seidel was returning to the home of his mother and step-father.

But both Anna Beer and Robert Seidel have left ghosts back in Vienna and each is confronted by problems when they return to the city. Dr Beer, who had been looking forward to reuniting with his wife - or at least trying to face their problems - is not at the apartment to meet his returning wife. He's missing after having returned to Vienna from the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. Robert's family is in an uproar because his older step-brother stands accused of killing his father (Robert's step-father). And Robert's mother is a drug dependent zombie.