The Guilty is a chilling and evocative historical suspense novel set in 1965 West Germany, where the past refuses to stay buried.

Young nurse Ella Kaffenberger arrives at Engelmann Hospital eager to begin her career working with children. But the hospital is a place of unsettling contrasts—half-renovated, half-ruin, filled with staff both old and new, and shadowed by whispers of a darker history.

Ella’s days become haunted by strange events: a patient’s desperate act, cryptic songs echoing from locked rooms, and an elderly woman who returns again and again, searching for a daughter no one believes exists. As Ella’s personal life becomes more entangled and secrets begin to surface, she is drawn into a web of silence, guilt, and unanswered questions.

Why are certain patient records missing? Why are some corridors never spoken of? And what legacy still lingers within Engelmann’s walls?

With lyrical prose and mounting tension, The Guilty explores the collision between innocence and complicity, the burden of unspoken history, and the quiet bravery it takes to confront truth.