Hauntings (Spuk)

A savvy noir novel that cleverly interweaves true crime, fiction, and magical elements.

Tucson, 1952. Washed-up private investigator Frank is hired to spy on emerging labor unions, but the desert heat is not his only adversary. In the middle of a routine surveillance job, a newspaper report triggers something far more dangerous than political unrest: memory. What begins as a flicker gradually turns into a relentless return of the past.

Fragments surface: postwar upheaval in Austria, shadowy dealings in Prohibition-era Los Angeles, morally dubious alliances and unfinished business. For years, Frank has survived by refusing to remember. Now the carefully sealed compartments of his mind begin to crack. What was his role in the turmoil he left behind in Eisenerz? What forced him to flee to the United States? And how are these scattered episodes bound together?

Blending documented history with fiction, Haunting traces one man’s gradual recovery of memory and responsibility. With a deft, intricately layered narrative, Florian Dietmaier explores guilt and complicity, crime and solidarity, and the unsettling realization that the hardest case to solve may be one’s own past.