Laura Förster Trilogy

Laura Forster decides to shirk the responsibility of following in her late father's footsteps as the managing director of a successful Hamburg-based logistics company. In order to come up for air, she rushes aboard the next best plane to the Caribbean, where her father's yacht, the Yellow Dancer, is berthed. What she doesn't know yet: she is unwittingly letting herself into a nightmarish journey to the other side of the Carrollian mirror, where life runs upside down and comforting certainties are as rare as a needle in a haystack. Will Laura succumb to the harrowing spectres of evil or will she prevail and return a duplicate of the tough, unforgiving amazon that is her newly-found sister Solitaire? One way or another, the hurricane-harried West Indies have never been a place for the meek and faint-hearted...

Whereas Yellow Dancer took Laura West to the Caribbean, Yilan makes her go East, to the Greek Aegean, where both she and her indomitable sister Solitaire follow the tracks of Süleyman the Silent who kidnaped Laura´s adopted son Ignace. It´s a desperate race against time and a hallucinating dance around a much-coveted legendary icon of the Virgin Mary that proudly carries the scars of revolutionary turmoil both in fledgeling modern Greece and a chaotic Soviet Union in the making. As always, Laura, a staunch agnostic herself, is firmly wedged between all fronts, Orthodox and otherwise. Undaunted, the unlikely twin sisters accept the challenge of a showdown in a giant long-abandoned and half decrepit wooden orphanage. Situated on the largest of the Princes´ Islands in the Marmara Sea just beyond the pale of Istanbul, the solitary orphanage is said to be resounding with the laughter and cries of kids occasionally, on calm and quiet nights...

Laura Forster´s doing it again. The third volume follows her, with some anticipation, to the Channel Islands, in the Bay of St. Malo. Here, she is busy unveiling a dark secret ultimately harking back to the German occupation during WW II. The focus of her investigations lies on the history of the legendary Yarmouth Six: a jolly band of six young expendables recruited from a notorious "juvie". Under the leadership of an inexperienced lieutenant straight from Sandhurst, they are to mount a "pinprick" commando raid on the heavily mined little island of Sark. A suicide mission, obviously, that soon runs into heavy waters and comes very close to a fubar end. One of the recruits drowns; others sustain gunshot wounds. When, finally, it´s each man for himself, the generalized confusion gives rise to a fair number of dreadful, shocking, but also rather hilarious episodes, laughter being deadlier than bullets. Once the war is over, the six survivors, who had narrowly failed to become the terror of the Nazis, decide henceforth to take better care of Number One by founding a brotherhood of crime, which, in turn, is to become the terror of the British Isles. All of that is a lot of water under the bridge. Or is it? A long and bloody trail appears to be leading from the six graves to a mysterious present-day murder spree. When, in the course of his vendetta, the killer shoots a certain Solveig by way of collateral, he´s made a bad mistake. Young Solveig happened to be the first great love-affair of Laura Forster´s adoptive son, Ignace. And God knows, the Forster family is not in the habit of taking such things lying down...