A pocket diary is found in the snow, and Joseph Muller — small, shabby, apologetic, the best man in the Vienna police — reads a life out of it and works back to a death. Groner was an Austrian schoolteacher who invented the first professional detective in German fiction; Muller solves it and, as usual, would rather not have. Fifty-nine plates of winter light by painters from Munch to Waldmüller, from snowbound forests to the poor receiving winter clothes, run through this tale of a diary lost in the snow.
