MURDER MINDFULLY

A German lawyer who’s already involved with the mob also gets involved with a mindfulness regimen. It’s hard to say which of these two is lethal.

When Katharina Diemel, unhappy with her husband Björn’s workaholism; neglect of her and their 2-year-old, Emily; and subservience to his principal client, violent criminal Dragan Sergowicz, insists that he step away from the rat race, Björn consults mindfulness counselor Joschka Breitner. Their months of sessions are so rewarding that they leave two indelible legacies. One is Dragan’s death after he pushes Björn just a little too far. The other is the brief excerpts from Breitner’s magnum opus, Slowing Down in the Fast Lane, that head each chapter of Dusse’s first novel. It turns out that mindfulness offers Björn a path to inner peace, stronger relationships with his wife and daughter, the guts to tell his bosses in the most mindful way possible that he’s not going to take any more from them, and the ability to come up with a remarkable series of strategies to persuade driver and personal assistant Sasha Ivanov, narcotics sales manager Toni, ex-friend and present competitor Boris, and the rest of Dragan’s associates that the boss has gone into hiding and appointed Björn as his spokesperson and chief deputy. It’s obviously a very temporary arrangement, but one that allows Björn not only to engineer several more homicides but to focus on what’s most important in his life: getting Emily into a good preschool. Readers with a taste for unpunished violence may also emerge with a more mindful perspective on their own lives.

A one-joke suspenser whose marvelously rich joke is worth every one of its 416 pages.