Dan Vyleta begins The Crooked Maid with two strangers who meet on a train: Anna Beer, a woman who has not seen her husband for nine years, and Robert Seidel, a boy returning home from boarding school. Both are headed to a Vienna largely destroyed by World War II; both share far more than a hometown, though neither know it. Their story is not so much a single mystery as a collection of mysteries, each following from the last and leading onto the next. Who is the maid, Eva, who has made herself at home in the Seidel house? Why has Anna's husband not been seen in days--and why is his desk littered with fragments of letters to an orphanage? When three local boys stumble across a corpse, the event seems unconnected to the rest of the tale--so how does one of them end up in court with Robert's stepbrother?
The novel's postwar European setting conveys the sparse, foreboding mood of Poe or Dostoevsky. Now and then, a single moment stands out brightly against the gloom: a bottle of milk, a red hat, a damaged eye. Vyleta wraps such details into the novel's mysteries as tightly as his characters, revealing that the relationships that make up our world are as densely connected as they are obscure. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket