Postmodern terrorists are money hungry, media conscious, and hard to pin down, as Gerhard Self, an aging private detective, comes to realize in Self’s Deception (Vintage), a darkly intriguing new murder mystery by Bernhard Schlink (The Reader). As entertaining as the story is (what role did the attractive, elusive Leonore Salger play in an explosive underground plot; who is the charismatic man in the mirrored sunglasses; what did the map show…), the deeper mystery in this novel is Self himself, a finicky, impatient, guilt-ridden former government prosecutor who can’t come to terms with his past.
