Berta, an inconsolable divorcée, decides to follow her ex-husband and his young lover to America, where, as a medical doctor, he has been invited to attend a symposium. Projecting her own paranoid feelings of suspicion and fear to the woman she claims destroyed her life, Berta conceives and puts into action a pathetic plan of revenge. It is doomed to fail because her rival’s confident and fearless nature is the opposite of her own.

Set in Lisbon and New York City, Crime Without A Corpse has the intense, eery atmosphere of a psychological thriller, perfectly matching Berta’s obsessive behaviour, the product of a deeply troubled mind.

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“In her confident, laconically told story, Ana Nobre de Gusmão casts an ironic eye on the persistently traditional views her own generation has of relationships in the nineties. In the episode where Berta visits her friend in the WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) world of New England, she has achieved a masterpiece of ‘miniature- prose.” Thomas Sträter, Neue Zürcher Zeitung 14.11.02 

 

“A brilliant thriller that keeps the reader imprisoned in a web of fear and revenge.” Barbara Pikullik, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger 8.11.02

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