The Mattress House by Paulus Hochgatterer

The Mattress House

Paulus Hochgatterer

A gripping detective story but not for anyone gets too upset by child abuse. I found it very readable with a lightness of touch, in spite of the subject matter. There were some brighter moments too.

Extract
We go up the stairs, turn left and go into their bedroom. I hold my breath and look over to the window and up to the ceiling. We go to the back of the dressing room, to the little door between the cupboards that you can only see if you know it’s there. I take the picture of the hedgehog and the owl off the wall. Behind it is the keyhole.
There are three rooms: the white one, the stripy one and the flower room. I named them after the mattresses lying in them. To be precise, there are two white mattresses and one with bright-blue dots in the white room; in the stripy room there’s a double mattress with wide blue and yellow narrow stripes; and in the flower room there are four mattresses piled on top of each other, all with pastel-coloured blossom. The two tripods with the cameras are always in a different place. This time they are in the white room.
Parallels
  • The Sweetness of Life by Paulus Hochgatterer
  • Sidetracked by by Henning Mankell
  • Voices by Arnaldur Indridason
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Violence
Explicit sexual content