The Bone Man

The wry and rueful Columbo of Austria investigates a grisly murder at a beloved restaurant where snooty Viennese gourmands go to eat ... fried chicken. At a wildly popular chicken shack in the Austrian countryside, a gruesome discovery is made in the pile of chicken bones waiting to be fed into the basement grinder: human bones. But when former-police detective now private eye Simon Brenner shows up to investigate, the woman who hired him has disappeared ... Brenner likes chicken, though, so he stays, but finds no one will talk. And as he waits for the disappeared manager, there's one ghastly find after another. Perhaps the most raucous book in the series, The Bone Man manages to make fun of institutions from high cuisine to soccer while nonetheless building relentless suspense based in all-too-real social issues. Smart, tense, and funny, the book makes clear why Carl Hiaasen called Wolf Haas ''the real deal.'' At a wildly popular chicken shack in the Austrian countryside, where snooty Viennese gourmands go to indulge their secret passion for fried chicken, a gruesome discovery is made in the pile of chicken bones waiting to be fed into the basement grinder: human bones.But when private eye Simon Brenner shows up to investigate, the manager of the restaurant, who hired him, has disappeared ... while the owner of the place urges him to stay on and eat chicken.Brenner likes chicken, so he stays, but as he waits for the manager, he discovers that the bucolic countryside is full of suspicious types: prostitutes, war profiteers, unsavory art dealers, Slavic soccer champs with dubious pasts — and at least one rather grisly murderer. And the more Brenner looks into things, the more it dawns on him that there’s a cleaver somewhere with his name on it.