A morass of political mafia, godfathers and lobbyists in František Šmehlík's new detective story The Beast
The Interior Minister verbally attacks a young journalist who writes about his alleged links to the underworld. The conflict full of threats is caught on camera, which sparks a big media scandal. A few days later, the journalist and his partner are murdered. According to a number of indications, the murder was a contract killing, but the manner of the journalist's girlfriend's murder is a reference to an unsolved series of murders in Šumperk seven years ago. Chief Investigator Laura Ara and her colleagues (including Václav Cesta, whom readers know from the detective novel To Hear the Deer Sing) wade through a morass of political mafia, godfathers and lobbyists with ties to foreign criminal gangs. Was the killer's main goal really to silence an inconvenient journalist?
František Šmehlík
František Šmehlík (* 1995) comes from Ostrava. Since childhood he has been involved in sports, especially judo, in which he won three national championship titles, competed at the European Championships, World Championships and the European Youth Olympics. Besides judo, his passion is literature. He graduated in Bohemia at Palacký University. In 2015, he published a collection of horror short stories, Dark Sign, and in 2021 his first detective novel, To Hear the Deer Sing, was published by Argo. She is currently working on a free trilogy with Olomouc investigator Laura Ara. His detective novels are characterised by a sense of sophisticated plotting, the psychology of individual characters, and a crossover into other literary genres.
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