Germany is a crime country.

One can explain this with anxiety: the worst, the murder, is already over, now order is being restored.

An odor of spiked hood Biedermeier wafts around such actions.

In Great Britain, the home of Hitchcock and John le Carré, things smell different.

There, as is well known, the thriller is valued more highly, the game with fear, which takes place to a large extent in the heads of those involved (even in “Sherlock Holmes”).

The adrenaline surges, the threat knows no escape, suspicion becomes universal.

Fear, as the hero of the miniseries The Fear Index, a brilliant, mildly autistic programmer who developed an outstanding stock trading algorithm, also emphasizes, fear is the strongest of all human emotions.

Nobody wakes up at four in the morning

Fateful inevitability

The fact that the Brit Robert Harris, who at least doesn't seem unhappy, is one of the most successful thriller authors of our time is not least due to the fact that he knows how to convert historical and social material into crisp dramas of fateful inevitability.

His talent is particularly impressive in the ingeniously self-reflective novel The Fear Index, published in 2011.

Harris makes the constitutive feature of a thriller the subject of a suspense plot.

The protagonist, who is actually poor in emotion, the aforementioned computer scientist, into whom paranoia is creeping in because he suddenly seems no longer allowed to trust himself, knows better than any behavioral psychologist how much fear influences securities trading.

Just a year earlier, on May 6, 2010, a so-called “flash crash” had occurred on the American financial market.

For almost half an hour, the courses collapsed dramatically, driven by fear insofar as there are built-in safeguards in computer trading that lead to automatic sales when the price falls.

In times of high-speed trading, the turbulence was enough to give individual traders astronomical profits.

It was unclear whether the burglary was intentional.

A securities dealer in London was targeted a few years later, but initially there was speculation about malicious algorithms.

Harris followed suit and wrote his thriller in near real time about stock market guru Alex Hoffman, whose algorithm no longer obeys him while at the same time his life spirals out of control,

but everything that happens to him seems to have been commissioned by himself.

Alex vacillates between fearing he's become schizophrenic (he was in therapy for strange desires) and suspecting hacker conspiracies are after his empire or planning to destroy the financial system.

He doesn't come up with the most obvious idea for a long time.