Strange Loop - Hardcover

Ludwig, an ageing and respected Austrian philosopher of scientific methodology, returns to the English convent where he worked as librarian briefly one summer soon after qualifying as a doctor. He's not sure why he's gone back. Or rather, he won't allow himself to question why he's gone back. After all: the "answers could concern no one but myself ... for there surely could be no one else left to remember that summer sequence of atrocities. No one, unless, that is..."

Young, arrogant and thoroughly prejudiced against the nuns and the chaplain (whom he nicknamed by their most distinguishing feature--Frogface, Whiskers, Jitters) Ludwig became convinced they were hiding something. Who was living in the other turret? Were they held there against their will? If so, why? And who was borrowing the philosophical texts from the convent library and annotating them so expertly and in such an un-nunlike manner

Amanda Prantera--author of eight other novels--has, in Ludwig, created an ideal narrator for this suspenseful gothic-fiction-cum-detective-story. His precise logician's lingo acts like a brake on the page-turning plot line to produce a gorgeously unbearable tension. The convent setting is appropriately claustrophobic; its inhabitants nervy, odd or both and the novel's denouement is surprisingly horrific yet entirely believable. Strange Loop is a clever, hair-raising and thought-provoking read. Lisa Gee