Nejhorší obavy – Sýkora Michal (2020)

The beloved Commissioner Marie Výrová from the series Detectives from the Holy Trinity is back. After four novels, the popular investigator Marie Výrová returns in a collection containing three longer stories. After leaving the police, she accepted an offer from the Great Owl to lecture on practical criminology at the University of Olomouc. However, even a calm academic career cannot protect her from contact with crime; she must once again join forces with former colleagues in investigations that personally affect her. In the story "Before the Flood," Marie, at the urging of her student Lucie, revisits a nineteen-year-old traffic accident that may not have been an accident at all. The interest in the long-closed case triggers a series of dramatic events in which both she and Lucie are fighting for their lives. In the story "The Life's Work of Academician Plíšek," she must come to terms with the death of a friend murdered under circumstances that strongly resemble a classic "locked room mystery." And the titular story "The Worst Fears" finds Marie in the Jeseníky Mountains, where she originally planned to buy a cottage. Instead, she gets involved in a case featuring a local womanizer and businessman, an unfaithful wife of a spa doctor, and a single mother—all during a time of heightened campaigning before the municipal elections.