★Estonia has received the 2025 Pila "Best Slovene Crime Fiction Novel" Award.
★Rights sold to: Ukraine.
★Bestselling Slovenian Crime Fiction Author Avgust Demšar with over 25,000 copies sold.
★The most successfull TV series in Slovenian TV production with over 1 million viewers.
★Avgust Demšar was awarded with the 2025 Glazer Award for special achievements in literature.

In 1994, a Slovenian couple left their three-year-old daughter in the care of friends in Stockholm while they took a weekend trip to Tallinn. Their return on the Estonia ferry ended tragically, with their disappearance into the Baltic Sea. Thirty years later, their adopted daughter, Iva, still feeling a connection to Slovenia, and her husband decided to renovate her parents’ house in the picturesque village of Vodnjaki on Pohorje. However, when a decades-old corpse with a connection to Iva is discovered during renovations, retired detective Martin Vrenko is drawn into a complex web of intrigue, potentially linking the murder to the Slovenian War of Independence and the Estonia ferry disaster, as well as involving a cast of intriguing characters in Vodnjaki. As one suspect vanishes and Iva’s marriage faces strain, Martin Vrenko takes on the challenge of uncovering the truth.

Avgust Demšar is a Maribor-based writer who writes exclusively detective stories. In collaboration with the publishing house, he created one of the first Slovenian cyclical detective opuses in 2007-2012, six novels with the common title Primeri inšpektorja Vrenko. With the seventh novel, Miloš (2013), he continued the series of classic detective stories of the type kdo je torilec (Who is the Murderer?), while at the same time introducing new literary characters instead of the established ones, Inspector Miloš, detective Nika Lavrič, and detective Drago Jazbec. He combined both crime groups in his next novel, Pohorska transverzala (2016), and a similar situation is also present in his latest novel, a crime novel titled Otok (expected to be published in 2018).

Excerpts from Demšar's novel Tanek led (2009) were published in the magazine Lud Literatura, his work is presented on the national radio in the shows "Literary portrait", "Views on contemporary art" and "Saturday reading", he participated in the literary evening Pota žernske literatura at the Konzorcij bookstore, at the Sanje festival, etc.

Avgust Demšar was nominated for the Kresnik Award, the Delo Award for the best novel of the past year, for his literary debut, a detective novel titled Olje na balkonu (in 2008), for his second novel, a detective novel titled Retrospektiva (in 2009), for his fourth titled Evropa (in 2010) and for his fifth titled Hotel Abbazia (2011). The real name of the author, who is an assistant professor of art didactics at the Department of Preschool Education, Faculty of Education, University of Maribor, is Tomaž Zupančič.

In April 2017, Avgust Demšar participated in a public competition for the development of a TV series, which was announced by RTV Slovenia and was selected among 28 submitted proposals. In January 2018, RTV Slovenia purchased six scripts from Demšar, developed based on his novels Olje na balkonu, Retrospektiva and Tanek led. Based on these, they plan to shoot six 50-minute episodes of a crime TV series with the working title Primeri inšpektorja Vrenko.

The main permanent characters in Demšar's detective stories are senior criminal inspector Martin Vrenko, senior criminal investigator Ivana Premk and young criminal investigator Marko Breznik. They are also accompanied by homophobic police officer Aleksander Rep, Roma police officer Oskar Brajdič, prosecutor Luka Levstek and others. In the seventh novel, entitled Miloš, Demšar introduces new characters. The main investigator is the criminal inspector Miloš (whether it is a first name or a last name is unknown) and he is accompanied by senior criminal investigator Nika Lavrič and criminal investigator Drago Jazbec. Although the characters are new, the setting remains the same as in the previous novels, and at the same time, there are some hints in the novel that the heroes of Demšar's previous novels also exist in Miloš's literary world. In Demšar's eighth novel, entitled Pohorska transversala, subtitled Political Crime, both teams of literary detectives come together. This creates a conglomerate of relationships between them and, as an interesting fact – and a rarity – in one detective novel, it confronts the two main, titular literary inspectors.

Demšar's crime stories are set in the real environment of the city of Maribor and the real present time. Avgust Demšar's detective work is designed as a series in which the fates of the regular characters develop, while the detective stories are independent, completed wholes in each book.

Detective cases by Avgust Demšar are designed as classic detective puzzles ("Whodunit"). The stories are based on detection, hidden keys and clues, which are constantly available to the reader, who competes with the main characters and tries to solve the case together with them or even before them.

Although Demšar relies heavily on the classic genre rules of writing a detective novel, he also weaves current socially critical themes into his stories. He is critical of social differences, intolerance, homophobia and xenophobia.