Vienna Blood

In his article, Ethnographic Critique and Technoscientific Narratives: The old mole, ethical plateaux, and the governance of emergent biosocial polities, in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (25: 355-93. 2001)Michael M.J. Fischer uses this book as a juxtaposition to ethnographic descriptions of bio-ethical realties. It's rather interesting and may possibly add some insight into the novel

No short review can give a full appreciation of the many wonderful things operating in this brilliant book. The plotting is intricate, the research is meticulous, the style is mordant, and the ending is perfection. I do not know when I have read a novel that I have enjoyed more. Get it!

In 2026 Vienna, widow Petra Detmers asks columnist Oskar "Sharkey" Gewinnler to investigate the death of her spouse, Leo. Though officially declared a hit and run accident, Petra believes someone deliberately murdered her husband. Sharkey is unable to resist the woman's lure (even if she is pregnant) and begins to investigate what happened to Leo. To his shock, Sharkey learns many things about Leo who is not what he seemed. Soon, Sharkey finds a major conspiracy in the powerful industrial health care-government complex that reaches back to the days of Hitler's experiments in creating a super race. As he gets closer to the truth, Sharkey knows that he could soon be joining Leo, as silence is golden to his foes. VIENNA BLOOD is an intriguing futuristic drama that readers who enjoy a high tech tale with fully developed characters will enjoy. Vienna in the next century is cleverly designed so that much of the problems of this millennium still remain yet some technological breakthroughs have occurred. The characters feel genuine and the Hitler link works to provide the plot with a focus. Adrian Mathews pays homage to tales like The Third Man and even Star Wars (the cantina scene) with a novel that will one day have future writers pay similar esteem to him.

I loved HAVANA BAY (the newest Arkady Renko from Martin Cruz Smith), and I recommend VIENNA BLOOD for a lot of the same reasons. Both authors write so evocatively about where their respective cities that Havana and Vienna become characters in their books--grand and shadowy and corrupt and crumbling. Both write with complexity and insight--there's plenty of action etc., but neither writer condescends to the reader. Both offer twisty, unexpected plotting that keep you turning the pages till the very end. And both have protagonists into whose skin you crawl, willingly, on page 1. It's heresay to say that ANY character is as compelling as Arkady Renko--but Sharkey runs a close second.

I HAD NO IDEA this was going to be so good! I bought VIENNA BLOOD (in the airport) based almost entirely on its sinister cover--proves that sometimes you gotta trust your intuition. Adrian Mathews (whoever you are) is a genius, and this book is like nothing I've ever read. It's a wicked thriller, fast and completely surprising and not a little terrifying. But it's the WRITING that really knocks me out--smart, engaging, mind-bending prose that begs to be re-read and yet isn't too bloody pleased with itself. David Foster Wallace couldn't have written this book; but let's just imagine that David Foster Wallace walked into a dark alley one night and had every tooth knocked out of his head by Jim Thompson; then managed to crawl back to his typewriter to hammer out, while dying, a memorandum of what had just happened to him (he's dying, remember, so it would have to be to the point, more or less); and if that alley happened to be in Vienna, in the year 2026; and if what he wrote turned out to be VIENNA BLOOD--then, truly, he would not have died in vain.