Author Description

<b>"Ebullient ... Daitch finds stimulating connections and writes with sharp irony and joy. This offers delights on every page." --<i>Publishers Weekly</i></b><br> Award-winning author Susan Daitch returns with <i>Siege of Comedians</i>, a novel in triptych told through interconnected narrative threads pulled taut by linked crimes. <p>In the first piece, an American forensic sculptor, reconstructing the faces of three victims receives a midnight, visit from a man who threatens her life unless she alters the faces she's almost completed. The twists and turns of the mystery lead her to a new life, working with forensic archeologists at a site near the Prater amusement park in Vienna.</p> <p>In the second section, an accent coach discovers that the man implicated in the death of his girlfriend in 1970s Buenos Aires was once a censor and Assistant Minister of Propaganda in Vienna during World War II. When bodies start turning up under the former Propaganda offices, some date from the war period--but others are much older, their origins going back to the Ottoman siege of Vienna.</p> <p>In the final arc, in the aftermath of the last battle between the Austrians and the Turks, a local businesswoman finds three displaced women from Istanbul--former wives of the sultan--wandering in Vienna and gives them shelter in her brothel, located on the site of the future Ministry of Propaganda.</p> <p>Connected across time by intersecting crimes and themes of language, cultural assimilation, and nationalist conflicts, <i>Siege of Comedians</i>, part political thriller, part comic noir, reflects on aspects of the current refugee crisis, human trafficking, and identity.</p>