Not that Raeseng, the killer, was going to party after the job was done. On the contrary, he feels strangely lethargic. And agrees to have no feelings of guilt and no self-hatred. Cool, very cool, he gives himself, like the role models from the cinema: After the murder is before the beer. But why is he lying in bed for days, his head heavy as beer, leaden fatigue in his bones? And why is it increasingly impossible for him to fulfill the orders of the plotters exactly as planned?

The plotters are the people who prepare the job, who write the scriptwriting script that clarifies all the big W-questions: when should the murder happen and with what weapon, and how should the body be disposed of? Plotters, spotters and killers are part of a sophisticated system designed by South Korean author Kim Un Su Kim for his thriller "The Plotter".

Dahuim Paik

Author Kim Un Su

It works according to the laws of the market, according to supply and demand, and it knows no other rules. Anyone looking for a killer, drugs or weapons, visits the meat market, "the most capitalistic of all markets, nothing was forbidden, not by law, law or morality." Here, the housewife can have their unloved, but wealthy husband dispose of leaves, the business boss his competitors off, the luckless gambler sold off his organs and eventually those of his children.

Feelings stand in the way of the exchange of services and goods for money, and Raeseng is a product of this unleashed capitalism, a lone contractor who leads a bleak existence. Killing, beer, killing, beer, and so on, until the earliest-calculated early death: "I lived like a worm, and I'm going to die like a worm."

At no time does Kim begrudge his hero the grandezza that can be happily attributed to contract killers in the classic thriller. Raeseng is neither one of the great lonely, no disguised philosopher of dying, nor is he a hedonistic globetrotter, enjoying himself with champagne and beautiful women. He is little more than the finger that pulls the trigger, the fist that makes bones break. Even though he knows exactly what he is doing and for whom, he lets himself be used, again and again: "The idea that you could kill someone for something you believed scared him."

Six-digit advance sum

A fear that he developed in his youth when he discovered reading in the library, where the orphan boy grew up as the foster-child of a master plotter (and also serves as a meeting place for killers). While he saw all the great heroes - especially his favorite Achilles - fall in the end, he was overcome with "an overwhelming mistrust of life".

That the boy, who loses himself in the literature, later becomes a killer who ensures that the stories invented by the plotters have a happy ending in their favor, is one of the many fine Volten this novel, the thriller conventions certainly operated, but leaves it far behind.

Raeseng, the icy angel who has long since ended his life at the beginning of his thirties, will still have to learn to take a stand in the course of the novel. A woman, Mito, enters his life, and that - almost - with a bang: She installs a mini-bomb in Raeseng's apartment, and because he's once again into the beer rush, he almost missed her.

Mito just wanted to grab his attention - the killer should help her destroy the meat market. She's ready for anything. To kill and be killed. And Raeseng will have to think of something that one of his previous victims said to him: "Only those who really go their own way can choose their own death."

DISPLAY

Un-Su Kim:
The plotters

From the English by Rainer Schmidt

Europa Verlag, 360 pages, 24 euros

Order at Amazon. Order from Thalia.

If he finds this way at the end, that's the real thrill of this novel, which is about to start internationally nine years after it became a great success in South Korea. In the coming year "The Plotter" appears in England and the USA, allegedly a six-figure sum was due for the American rights.

Whether, as the "Guardian" speculated, South Korean thrillers around the world will let the cash register ring like Scandinavian thrillers have recently, must be doubted: The novels of Kim Un Su or Yu Jeong Jeong ("The Good Son" in January in the Union publisher) do not offer generic orgies of violence, but disturbing insights into ruined souls. In "The Plotter," Kim does not portray crime as aberrant behavior, but as the normal state in a world without values. Not necessarily the stuff bestseller is made of. But great literature.