Josh Pachter

Dangerous Obsessions Josh Pachter

Tight, taut and shocking, these stories all have warped love as the source of violence. Belgian/Flemish author, Bob Van Laerhoven, winner of the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category "Mystery/Suspense" and the Hercule Poirot Prize with his controversial novel, Baudelaire's Revenge, connects the fate of individuals with profound social changes. Van Laerhoven has been a travel writer in conflict-zones from 1990 until 2003 and echos of his experiences trickle through these confronting and thrilling tales, set in civil war-torn Algeria in the fifties, in a gypsy populated Polish concentration-camp during WWII, in a Peruvian border-town where stealing is a deadly art, in Liberia during the civil war in the nineties, and in Belgian Congo during the bloody uproar in the sixties. Omnia vincit amor-Love conquers all-the saying goes. But not our Dangerous Obsessions. Bob Van Laerhoven: a fulltime Belgian/Flemish author, Laerhoven published more than 35 books in Holland and Belgium. Some of his literary work is published in French, English, Italian, and Russian. Three times finalist of the Hercule Poirot Prize for best mystery novel of the year with the novels Djinn, The Finger of God, and Return to Hiroshima. Winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize for Baudelaire's Revenge, which also won the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category "mystery/suspense." His collection of short stories Dangerous Obsessions, first published by The Anaphora Literary Press in 2015, was hailed as "best short story collection of 2015" by the San Diego Book Review. Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish translations of Dangerous Obsessions will appear in 2018.