✍ Five: Beatrice Kaspary [1] - Ursula P. Archer

Genre: Mystery & Thrillers
Published 9 December 2014 by St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books
Number of pages: 333
Original Title: Fünf
Originally Published 16 February 2012
Translated by Jamie Lee Searle

My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆  It was memorable

"A woman’s corpse is discovered in a meadow. A strange combination of letters and numbers has been tattooed on the soles of her feet. Detective inspector Beatrice Kaspary from the local murder squad quickly identifies the digits as map coordinates. These lead to a series of gruesome discoveries as she and her colleague Florin Wenninger embark on a bloody trail – a modern-day scavenger hunt using GPS navigation devices to locate hidden caches. The "owner" of these unofficial, unpublished geocaches is a highly calculating and elusive fiend who leaves his victims’ body-parts sealed in plastic bags, complete with riddles that culminate in a five-stage plot. Kaspary herself becomes an unwilling pawn in the perpetrator’s game of cat and mouse as she risks all to uncover the motives behind the murderer’s actions. Five is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted, but it delivers great suspense, unexpected plot twists, and multi-dimensional characters."

What a ride!

I really liked this book - fast paced from the word go!

And it got me immediately intrigued by geocaching - I had never heard of this activity beforehand... but I did actually end up signing up to the website and look forward to taking part! (it sounds like a worthwhile activity whilst on holiday to discover your surroundings)... hopefully our findings will not be as gruesome as the ones Beatrice Kaspary and her partner Florin encounter in this story...

All of the characters were well developed and I could not help but sympathising with the culprit. An intense psychological thriller that kept me guessing till the end.

Five (Fünf) is a book originally written in German by Ursula Poznanski, a.k.a. Ursula P. Archer, a.k.a. Ursula Archer. To me this did not feel like a translation at all - the writing was excellent and very effective. I was sucked into the story immediately.
I would whole-heartedly recommend this to anyone into mystery, thrillers, whodunnit genre. Intense and gruesome, but not gratuitously gory.

Without a doubt one of the best books I have read recently.

I cannot wait for the next instalment in the Beatrice Kaspary series, Blinde Vögel (Blind Birds), to be translated... as unfortunately I cannot read German!