During World War II, Gerhard Selb was a prosecutor; after the war, he opened a detective agency. Now in his late seventies, he's constantly working, and every case turns into a major surprise—usually an unpleasant one. A childhood friend asks him to investigate hacker attacks, and Selb, who knows nothing about computers but is a good judge of character, uncovers a dark secret from the past that would have been better left unseen. An unknown client unceremoniously demands to find a missing girl, supposedly his daughter, and Selb is thrust into a frantic pursuit involving terrorism, phantom and real fires, betrayal, lies, and madness. A chance encounter with a banker leads to a seemingly simple assignment—find a secret partner of the bank—and suddenly people are dying for unknown reasons, financial fraud is uncovered, the mafia emerges from the murky depths, someone is kidnapped, everyone is lying, a battered man keeps knocking on the door with unexpected news, and all of this seriously threatens Selb's health. Such a life would have been difficult to bear had Selb not been blessed with charm, self-deprecating humor, the determination of a born detective, and the friendship of people willing to support him in the strangest situations. In 1987, Bernhard Schlink, a respected lawyer and educator, somewhat to the public's surprise, suddenly turned to the 'lighter' genre and, together with Walter Popp, wrote 'Selb's Justice,' followed by two sequels on his own, one of which won Germany's oldest and most prestigious crime literary award, the Deutscher Krimipreis; numerous awards for his famous novel 'The Reader' were yet to come. Schlink's Selb trilogy—three densely interwoven stories about how horror often lurks behind an innocent façade, and how the past will always catch up, no matter how hard you try to run.