The House in Vienna

Philip Mason, a civil aviation expert, takes early retirement and buys a cattle farm in the Highlands of Kenya at the time of Kenya’s independence in 1965. He and his beautiful, fun-loving Austrian wife Maria love one another, their cattle farm and their idyllic surroundings. But fate deals them a cruel hand; their house catches fire and everything is lost. Rather than attempting to rebuild their lives in Kenya, they move to Austria. For ten years, they live happily in a dream apartment, in a beautiful 200 year-old mansion, right in the middle of Vienna’s First District. But one day, their house suddenly starts vibrating.

Quite suddenly, each became conscious of the noise of vibration. As their eyes came to rest on Maria’s glass on the table in front of where she was sitting, each quickly realised that it was vibrating against the glass of the table. Then Paul said, ‘Look at the wall, Daddy, it has a big diagonal crack.’

Due to maintenance neglect, areas of construction weakness become evident – and the house is moving! Will it collapse? Can something be done to save it? And what about the occupants of the nine apartments in the house? What about their characters? Are they reasonable and constructive, are they uncaringly apathetic, are they tricky, even consumed by greed? And what is their reaction when one of them is murdered? In short, what lies behind their façade of decency?

“Structural problems, especially in old houses, is a little-known problem which occurs more frequently than most of us imagine. So I decided to write a novel with this problem as the central theme. In developing the story as a whole, as necessary I used my first-hand experience of such countries as Austria, Kenya, Viet Nam and the former USSR,” says author Colin Everard..