Pony Show is a Hamburg legal-and-literary thriller about Mark Steinert, a culture lawyer who becomes dangerously obsessed with his client, Bethany “Betty” Hell, the powerful head of the Lysander publishing house, while defending her against the alleged murder of Fero Lebed, a much younger publishing assistant who has disappeared. It wants to be a courtroom novel, a #MeToo satire, a publishing-world comedy, a feminist debate, a media circus, a midlife-crisis confession, a love story, a critique of legal storytelling, and a thriller about a body that may or may not exist. Mostly, it is a very long, very self-aware lecture on narrative, gender, desire, and reputation that keeps performing cleverness until the actual people inside the case nearly vanish.
The novel opens after a spectacular day in court. Outside the Hamburg Landgericht, protesters, journalists, slogans, tomato pulp, and graffiti have turned the building into a carnival ruin. Mark and Betty wait until the mob thins, then flee. Betty is relieved because Mark has won a ten-day adjournment; Mark is furious because new evidence has made the case much harder to dismiss. He drives her home and berates her in traffic, shouting that she still has not told him what really happened. She sits beside him in silence, enduring him the way she endures the trial. Already the book has its main dynamic: Mark thinks he is defending Betty, but he is also trying to possess the story of her.
Mark is in his early forties, married to Laura, father of Jojo and Mimi, owner of a slightly overdesigned cultural-law firm, Steinert, Bossmann & Finning. He and his partners Sara and Anton have built a boutique Hamburg practice defending writers, actors, directors, public intellectuals, and other fragile prestige-industry egos. They are used to scandals, harassment claims, canceled artists, stolen ideas, drug incidents, and media outrages. They are not used to murder.
