Stefan Gartmann: Buchpremière

"We think we know a person, but we don't. We only get a picture of him, and if he suddenly shows behavior that doesn't fit this image, we are frightened."

It happened on Alp Falätscha, far back in the Safien Valley. The discovery of a body, a crime 28 years ago. But what exactly happened there, that night when the people down in the Turrahus were at the dance festival? In the valley, everyone knows more than they are willing to say. Detective Jon Calonder and his colleague investigate. Their interrogations and interrogations lead deep into the community of fate of the mountains and bring to light a crime in which the boundaries between victim and perpetrator, between good and evil, are blurred. A murder case whose contours have dissolved in the fog of time.

Stefan Gartmann tells a deeply moving story about guilt and atonement, embedded in the impressively described mountain landscape of the Safiental. His main character is Xander Juon, a Pur suveran, an old stubborn mountaineer who does not seem to notice how his traditional world is falling apart. The detective, Jon Calonder from Chur, a character whose character the author illuminates to his deepest emotions and who occupies us just as much as all the meticulously precise and lovingly drawn characters that Stefan Gartmann weaves into his great story.

"Falätscha. On Silence in the Mountains" is in the tradition of literary crime novels as we know them from Friedrich Dürrenmatt or Friedrich Glauser.

Stefan Gartmann, born in 1962 in Santa Maria in the Münstertal. Childhood and youth in the Poschiavo and the St. Gallen Rhine Valley. Monastery school in Disentis, then Phil. I Studied at the University of Basel with German language and literature as a major subject and Italian literature as well as modern general history as minor subjects. During the summer holidays, as a high school student, he worked as a farmhand on the farm in the Safiental, as a student he worked as a labourer on various construction sites in the Lower Engadine. After completing his studies, he returned to his home canton and worked as a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons (FHGR) in Chur for over thirty years. Today he is a freelancer.