Redolent of Hitchcock, Schlink and le Carre, 'The Quartet' caused a sensation on its first publication in France. A devastating short novel about art, evil and the Holocaust, 'The Quartet' has the structure of a thriller, following a company psychologists's investigation of his director, Matthias Just, in the aftermath of the Second World War. In clear, beautiful prose, it tells of the collapse of Just, his dissolution of the company's string quartet, and the revelations of papers in his desk at home containing instructions for the construction of faultless vehicles for the extermination of humans - upon which musical notations are overlaid.