Jacques Berndorf (pen-name of the journalist Michael Preute) was born in Duisburg in 1936. He lives in – where other than – the Eifel region. Pipe-smoker Berndorf, who can not live without cats and a garden, refuses to write about people and things that he neither knows about nor has seen. "Jacques Berndorf is the thriller-novelist guru of the Eifel region," stated the Hamburger ‘Zeit’ newspaper.