Silent Shadows

Book excerpt: Eliot Dean’s life as a professor of English and Economics at the University of St Gallen is given a shock when he begins an affair with one of his students, seventeen-year-old Evie Muller, who believes one day that Eliot will be married. Eliot’s wife, Sandra, is an attractive woman, and Eliot has no intention of leaving her, especially as they have two children, thirteen-year-old Adam and ten-year-old Ilsa. Eliot’s boss, Gustav Schaefer, has always had some hold over Eliot’s life, since Eliot’s grandfather who was Gustav’s best friend, died in mysterious circumstances many years before. Although the death was investigated by the police, and accidental death was the verdict, there has always been a suspicion hanging over Eliot, who was present on the day his grandfather died in the cellar of the infamous Werdenburg castle. Evie invites Eliot to look into her background, having wondered what secrets her parents were keeping from her. Eliot complies and goes to Reichenau with Evie to look up her family history. They discover that her parents are not her real family, and that Evie is in fact Jewish of a mother who died in the Holocaust, and a father with whom may have had association with Hitler’s war machine. This discovery seemingly - changes everything. Gustav has his own demons to deal with and the police chief, Ernst Weber, who had first been on the scene when grandfather Dean died, finds out that Gustav also has a dubious past, and further investigations reveal that grandfather Dean may have discovered the secret past of his then good friend Gustav Schaefer. To which leaves Ernst Weber with a possible motive for murder. Driven by desire and the ensuing circumstances, with which he finds himself, and a worsening health condition, Eliot realizes things are spiraling out of control and things take a further sinister turn when his wife, Sandra, discovers the affair that her husband refuses to relinquish. With Eliot now suffering from pressures at work, the ensuing difficult situation between himself and Evie, and signs of schizophrenia - can he possibly find an answer to his problems or better still, a way out?