A body in the Vienna Stadtpark, a lamp that burned out at the wrong hour, and Joseph Muller — small, shabby, apologetic, the best detective in the police, and a man with a conviction of his own in the past. Groner was an Austrian schoolteacher who invented the first professional detective in German fiction; Muller's problem is that he keeps pitying the people he catches. Fifty-seven paintings from 1841 to 1924, among them Munch and Spitzweg, follow the story's mood through winter streets and lamplit rooms.
