The Package

Emma Stein was the third victim of a killer the press has dubbed "the Barber," who shaves his victims' heads before murdering them. Having survived, she now barely leaves her small house at the edge of Berlin's Grunewald, convinced she sees her attacker in every man she passes — even though she never actually saw his face.

Her isolation is broken when a mailman asks her to accept a package for a neighbor whose name she doesn't know, despite having lived on the street for years. What begins as an odd, small favor pulls Emma into a confrontation with both a killer who may still be hunting her and her own traumatic childhood memories, as the novel moves between timelines and the line between Emma's paranoia and reality steadily blurs.

Sebastian Fitzek builds one of his signature high-concept psychological thrillers around an unreliable, deeply traumatized narrator, keeping readers uncertain until the end which of Emma's fears are real and which are delusion.