Daisy and Bernard

In the summer of 1989 the Iron Curtain was unravelling, and Daisy Hayes had just become a pensioner who liked to do her ironing while listening to the latest news on the radio.The doorbell chimed. A police officer handed over a summons-printed in Braille. Daisy was being asked to testify about a baffling and gruesome murder, and had to follow the policeman at once. During the ride to New Scotland Yard, even before the first interview took place, the blind lady reflected that, though she knew nothing about this case, she would not be able to prove her innocence without revealing the two murders she actually had committed-many years ago.In an original twist to the "good cop-bad cop" routine, the older police investigator in charge of this strange case seemed to be very much in love with the blind suspect, and encouraged her to come clean and find redemption at long last."As we have almost come to expect from this author, Nick Aaron playfully tweaks and mixes the conventions of different genres, offering us a compelling murder mystery that is at the same time a heart-rending romance." – The Weekly BannerThis is the third volume of The Daisy Hayes Trilogy:I D for DaisyII Blind Angel of WrathIII Daisy and BernardWarning: a trilogy always has the disadvantage (?) that you have to read three books in the right order. On the other hand, each of these has a beginning, a middle and an end, and could be read on its own if you're willing to miss out on the narrative arc of the whole.This trilogy as a whole is a story of crime, punishment, and redemption, and at the same time a portrait of the twentieth century as witnessed by one remarkable blind woman.In the first volume Daisy Hayes is between 16 and 27, and she takes us along with her through World War II. The second volume brings us to the Swinging Sixties, Daisy is then 44. And finally in the third book she's 66 and it is 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down.Dear Daisy would have been born in 1922 and would probably be dead by now, or alternatively, still alive and kicking in her 90s. Nick Aaron is Dutch, but he was born in South Africa (1956), where he attended a British-style boarding school, in Pietersburg, Transvaal. Later he lived in Lausanne (Switzerland), in Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Belgium. He worked for the European Parliament as a printer and proofreader. Currently he's retired and lives in Malines.Recently, after writing in Dutch and French for many years, the author went back to the language of his mid-century South African childhood. A potential global readership was the incentive; the trigger was the character of Daisy Hayes, who asserted herself in his mind wholly formed. Daisy Hayes was born in London in 1922. Her father was a bank manager, hoping for a son, but he had to settle for a blind daughter.Now what do you do when your child is blind since birth and you have the means to do all that is necessary to help her? You hire a private tutor to stimulate her verbal abilities in the first years of her life, because you realize how vital language will become for her. Then you send her to an exclusive school where everything is done to develop the minds and resourcefulness of blind girls. There they teach them all these fancy techniques of spatial orientation and mind mapping. And before you know it, your darling daughter has become a smart female detective who just seems to draw murder mysteries like a magnet…