Dominik Mikulaschek: Seven Minutes, Gebunden

Blurb

In **"Seven Minutes: Nobody Sees What Happens in the Dark"**, a quiet street becomes the perfect stage for fear, deception, and a crime that seems to point in only one direction. Mara Stein never planned to stay. A stranger slips her a folded note in a café, tells her to check the coordinates, and disappears before she can ask a single question. No name. No explanation. Just numbers. They lead her to an old neighborhood at the edge of the city, a place with narrow sidewalks, dark brick houses, small front gardens, and the kind of silence that feels wrong the moment you step into it.

At first, nothing looks dangerous. The street seems ordinary, almost forgettable. But then Mara notices a public notice attached to a lamppost: **planned power shutdown at 10: 22 p. m., duration approximately seven minutes**. It sounds harmless. Routine maintenance. A technical interruption. Yet the timing feels too precise, too deliberate. Seven minutes is not long enough to understand what is happening, but it is long enough for something terrible to be done.

When the lights go out, the darkness is total. Not just one house. Not just one corner. The entire street is swallowed at once. In those seven minutes, Mara hears footsteps moving with unnatural confidence, as if someone knows every inch of the road by heart. She hears a metallic click near the power distribution shed. A generator starts and stops in an eerie pattern. A dog begins barking at the exact right moment, almost like a signal. Then someone collides with her in the dark and whispers a single word in her ear. When the lights come back, a man is lying motionless on the pavement, and beside him is an object from Mara's own pocket.

From that moment on, everything turns against her. A witness claims she saw Mara in the darkness. Evidence appears too quickly and too neatly. Statements sound rehearsed. Timelines do not make sense, yet somehow they always circle back to the same conclusion: Mara was there, Mara touched him, Mara caused it. The deeper she digs, the more she realizes that this is not a random blackout, not an accident, and not bad luck. Someone has built a system around those seven minutes. Someone is using darkness like a weapon.

As Mara fights to prove her innocence, she uncovers a chilling pattern of manipulated evidence, controlled power failures, scripted witnesses, and hidden routes through the neighborhood. Certain windows briefly light up during the blackout. Logs do not match real times. People move through the darkness as if they have rehearsed every step. What looks like chaos is actually choreography. What looks like panic is planned. And what looks like guilt may be the final piece of a trap designed long before Mara ever arrived.

**"Seven Minutes"** is a gripping **psychological thriller**, a dark and addictive **suspense novel** filled with tension, paranoia, and relentless twists. Perfect for readers who love **psychological suspense**, **domestic thrillers**, **crime thrillers**, **blackout thrillers**, **mystery suspense books**, and stories about **false accusations**, **manipulation**, **hidden agendas**, and **danger lurking in ordinary places**. With a strong female protagonist, an atmosphere of constant unease, and a high-concept premise that feels both original and terrifyingly believable, this thriller pulls readers into a world where truth can be manufactured and darkness can rewrite reality.