Commissioner Marie Výrová, known from the TV series Detectives from the Holy Trinity, returns in three long short stories
After four novels, the popular investigator Marie Výrová returns in a collection containing three long short stories. After leaving the police force, Marie accepted an offer to lecture on practical criminology at the university in Olomouc. However, even a quiet academic career cannot protect her from contact with crime; she must once again join forces with former colleagues in investigations that affect her personally.
In the short story 'Before the Flood', Marie, at the instigation of her student Lucie, revisits a nineteen-year-old traffic accident that may not have been an accident at all. The interest in this long-closed case triggers a series of dramatic events that put both her and Lucie's lives at risk. In 'The Life's Work of Academician Plíšek', she must come to terms with the death of a friend murdered under circumstances strongly reminiscent of a classic 'locked-room mystery'. And the title story, 'Worst Fears', finds Marie in the Jeseníky Mountains, where she had originally planned to buy a cottage. Instead, she gets involved in a case whose protagonists are a local womaniser and entrepreneur, the unfaithful wife of a spa doctor, and a single mother—all during a heated mayoral election campaign. The reader will find everything that makes the author's novels so popular: the likeable character of 'Big Owl', a thrilling investigation, believable characters, an interesting setting, and current social issues.
