EAGLES AND ANGELS

A haze of drug addiction and anomie hangs over this bleak tale of obsessive love and underworld dealings, the first novel by a young German writer. When Max, a successful Viennese attorney in his early 30s, is left desperate and forlorn following the suicide of his girlfriend, Jessie, he calls Clara, a 23-year-old radio host. Far from lending a sympathetic ear—when Max recalls that Jessie shot herself while on the phone with him, Clara says, "[S]urely there must have been blood and brains all over it"—she wants his story for her psychology dissertation. In exchange for being put up at her apartment, Max finally agrees to talk into a DAT recorder between lines of coke. As he tells it, he first met Jessie at boarding school, where she was dating his roommate, Shershah, and dealing coke for her sinister father, Herbert, and brother, Ross. Tiny and unstable, Jessie reenters Max's life 12 years later and sucks him into her downward spiral. As Max continues spinning his tale on tape, he begins to uncover larger conspiracies and connections that threaten not only him but also his odd partnership with Clara and his memories of Jessie. Folding the story of Max's tortured love for both women into a larger chronicle of European drug smuggling and related war crimes, Zeh weaves a nightmarishly effective tale of personal and societal collapse. (Nov.)

Forecast: Zeh has been compared to Michel Houllebecq, and readers looking for another grim vision of contemporary Europe—with an action-adventure twist (think Run Lola Run)—will find much to appreciate here.