Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 11, 1993 TAG: 9312110087
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: C-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by LYNN ECKMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Blending fact with fiction, historical figures with imagined characters, violence with Victorian prudery, Carol de Chellis Hill has woven an intricate and compelling tableau of Vienna at the turn of the last century.
She maintains suspense throughout the novel, even though its pace never exceeds that of the horse-drawn carriages which then were the normal mode of transportation. A professor of writing at New York University, the author belies the adage which states that those who cannot do, teach.
When the number of women slain in Vienna grows to alarming heights, Sigmund Freud, Edith Wharton and Henry James find themselves suspects. Hill's academic know-how serves her well here; she makes such absurdities appear logical as she reveals their respective secrets and possible motives for murder. Readers unfamiliar with these personages need not fear; these luminaries do not diminish the characters the author fabricates.
"In Vienna black horses galloped." Like Wagner's leitmotifs, this phrase recurs often to convey the confusion of an American family, a Russian countess and Inspector Maurice Cheval Le Blanc, called from Paris to end the slaughter. Individually and collectively, these people equal or surpass their better known contemporaries. Their stories and relationships seem only too pertinent to the horror of our own fin de siecle.
Women's rights, anti-Semitism, romance, aberrant psychology, the craft of writing . . . these concerns have not vanished or been resolved in the past 100 years. Hill piques our interest and makes us examine these phenomena with a fresh perspective. She does this while making us read faster and faster, as the horses, too, speed their gaits; to learn more about the love affair between the countess and the inspector, the desire of a child to star in a novel, the relationship between Freud and Jung and the perpetrator of the killings.
That this is a complicated and confusing story cannot be denied. Like Hitchcock's movies, it even contains cameo roles for Mahler, Klimt and Lilly Langtry, for example. And like Hitchcock's films, Hill's book demands our attention and our applause.
by CNB