Books like Fatal lies by Frank Tallis

The third book in Frank Tallis’s Dr. Max Liebermann series returns to Vienna’s 1903 St. Florian Military School. A cadet’s razor‑cut death throws the elite institution into suspicion. Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt enlists his friend and Freud disciple, Dr. Max Liebermann, who employs emerging psychoanalytic tools—dream analysis and the ink‑blot test—to untangle the school’s tangled web of power, sadism, and hidden motives. As Liebermann investigates, he discovers that the victim frequented the deputy headmaster’s alluring wife, suggesting new motives. Amidst these revelations, Liebermann confronts personal turmoil: his growing affection for the Englishwoman Miss Lydgate clashes with his romantic entanglement with the passionate Hungarian violinist Trezska Novak, whose uncanny intuition further complicates the case. The investigation expands beyond the school to expose espionage rings, threatening the stability of the Habsburg Empire. Fatal Lies explores themes of sex, power, deception, and the fragility of authority in a pre‑World War I world.

First publish date: 2008