The Trap

The Trap: Reading Group Guide Contains spoilers

Discussion Questions

In what ways is Linda Conrads a reliable narrator? In what ways is she not?

Linda is obsessed not only with bringing her sister’s murderer to justice, but also with finding out why Anna died. How do you think Linda’s grief is similar or different to someone whose friend or family member died from natural causes?

Do you think Linda was justified in her plan? If not, at what point did she cross the line?

Discuss Linda’s and Victor’s sense of ethics. How are they similar? Different? Do you believe that most people’s ethical framework is absolute or relative to the situation on hand?

Where do you think Linda ends and Sophie begins?

“Am I mad? No, I’m not mad. How can you tell you’re not mad? You just can… I listen to the voices arguing in my head, and I no longer know which of them is the rational one.” Discuss the concept of sanity and our perception of it. Is Linda mentally unstable, grieving, or something else entirely?

The way Linda and Victor interact is shockingly intimate at times, considering the fact that Linda believes him to be her sister’s murderer. Why do you think this is?

“So it was off to Italy, in spite of everything. For an entire week, I had retreated to three upstairs spare rooms that I never use and rarely go in, and pronounced them Italy.” What are some of the many worlds and realities that exist within this book? How are they constructed?

“I am alone a lot; I seldom have the opportunity to have a really good look at a face. So I look at Lenzen and watch as the monster turns into a perfectly normal man before my eyes.” How do you think other people — their thoughts, reactions, or mere presence — affect and shape our sense of self?

“I think of Anna — not the angelic Anna I’ve spent the past years creating in my mind and in my writing, but the real Anna I used to quarrel with and make it up with — the Anna I loved.” How do you think a person’s image changes after he or she dies?

A Conversation with Melanie Raabe

Do you think your experience of acting and writing plays has affected your style as a novelist?

I think so, yes! Really getting into my characters’ heads is important to me and my experience in acting helps with that. I really tried to think and feel like Linda thinks and feels and then write from there. And as someone who loves the theater, I am a bit of a sucker for unique and dynamic dialogue. Considering that a big part of my book is just Linda and Lenzen talking, I think you can really make out my interest in plays.

Linda’s sanity is called into question in various ways throughout the novel, and the reader is kept continually guessing if she had concocted Victor’s identity as the killer. Did you always know that you wanted Victor Lenzen to be the real murderer, or did you go back and forth? Did you make any major changes to the plot while writing?

When I first planned out the book, I thought it would mainly be about whether or not Linda gets Lenzen to confess and if so, how. But when I started writing I realized that the question whether Linda was actually right was at least as compelling. So I made a lot of changes. I threw out a lot of my initial plans when new ideas came up since I always like to go with my instincts.

But I knew one thing right from the beginning and I never wavered from my position on that: Linda is right. Linda is not crazy. She has a lot of problems, but she does her best to overcome them. I wanted her to grow a lot during the course of the novel, and I wanted her to come out strong in the end. Exhausted, wounded — but strong.

In a way, Linda finds a kind of therapy in her writing, using it to discuss a topic from which she had shut herself off completely in real life. Do you identify with this tendency at all?

Absolutely! Writing can be very therapeutic. It might be a bit of a cliché, but it is also true. Writing about your life, your experiences and your fears can be such a healing experience. Working through things in your head is one thing. Putting them into words and writing them down, maybe even fictionalizing them is something else entirely. You learn to see things from a different angle, I guess. It helps you gain perspective.

What was the experience of writing a novel within a novel like? Was it difficult to write as the author Linda Conrads?

It was an interesting experiment — delivering my readers two novels in one book. Writing from Linda’s perspective as the first-person narrator wasn’t difficult at all. These parts of the book are written in my own style, so that all came very easily and developed organically. But for the novel within the novel I wanted to create a style that differs from my own. That was much harder to do — but it was also a lot of fun. I really liked the idea to show readers what Linda’s life was like through this fictionalized version of her past instead of through simple flashbacks. Especially since it keeps readers guessing whether her accounts of the past are correct — or whether she is fooling them with one of her made-up stories once more.

Your book plays a lot with the concepts of sanity, reality, and world building. Do you think that everyone copes with life by escaping to other realities?

Absolutely! And I think we actually all live in very different realities. I love this Anaïs Nin quote: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” We all see the world through our own colored glasses.

The novel is nicely bookended by Linda asserting “I am not of this world,” and “Before me lies the world.” Did you intend for this novel to be more about the mystery of Anna’s murder or Linda’s way of dealing with and overcoming it?

For me it was all about my protagonist. I knew I wanted to write about this young, female recluse before I even knew I wanted to write a mystery novel. But it started to get really interesting for me when I decided to put the two together: The story of a woman with a lot of problems who overcomes them in the end — and a hopefully gripping mystery.

Why did you choose to write about sisters?

Relationships between sisters are often rather complicated. I don’t have a sister, I have a brother. But I have talked to enough people to know about the sometimes strange dynamics between sisters. So I thought that might be interesting to write about. I like complex characters and I like complex relationships. Things aren’t always as simple as love or hate. Writing about sisters gave me the opportunity to explore that.

Although you have written four previous novels, The Trap was the first one to be acquired for publication. Were the other novels also mysteries? How is The Trap similar and different from those books?

The Trap is the first real mystery I wrote. All of my previous novels dealt with topics like identity and estrangement, and I think you can also find traces of that in The Trap. I have always been interested in psychology and I have always been interested in characters who have a very specific view of the world. I believe what differentiates The Trap from everything I have written before is the fact that in my older novels, I really explored human nature and my own psyche, but I didn’t pay much attention to entertainment aspects. My earlier texts helped me to grow as a writer, but in hindsight I would say that they weren’t necessarily engrossing reads. I wanted to have a little more fun with The Trap. I am an avid reader myself and while I was writing I thought about what I — as a reader — would like to experience. And then I went and wrote that. The Trap was all about giving readers something that is as suspenseful and satisfying as all those wonderful novels I love so much myself.

The Trap has recently been optioned for film. Do you have any hopes or dreams for the movie?

I am a country girl from a very small village in Germany — and I love the movies. So of course it would be extremely exciting to see my novel get the Hollywood treatment. There are so many different layers to my story. What would a film concentrate on? What would Linda look like? What would Lenzen look like? I am very curious how this all turns out. Exciting times!

What’s next on your horizon? Are you working on anything new?

I am busily working on my next novel. It is going to be a mystery again. Very psychological, very twisty. A lot like The Trap—but then again totally different.