THE NEW DETECTIVE

Munich’s mean streets don’t toughen up a young police recruit, but World War I does.

After three previous mysteries following grim, dedicated German detective Willi Geismeier through the 1920s and into World War II, Steiner’s fourth installment takes the reader back to the beginning of Geismeier’s career. Hired in 1913 as a patrolman in the Munich police force, Geismeier, 19 and looking like a schoolboy, is partnered with old-school cop Werner Heisse, whose approach to showing him the ropes has a sadistic streak. Through meticulous police work on a corruption case that comes together piece by piece, Geismeier solves the murder of muckraking journalist Walter Metzger, found beaten to death in an alley. While Heisse is awarded a commendation, Geismeier is sent to Belgium to fight in the war. Steiner’s title, which has a sly double meaning, introduces a tale that unfolds as a triptych. The plot jumps over the hero’s battlefield experience to a hospital in late 1917, where Geismeier is recovering from injuries. The center of the novel is his societal reintegration, which involves family nurturing and intense physical labor. When he returns to the police department, he resembles an old man. What Geismeier has lost in enthusiasm he’s made up for in authority. Now he stumbles into a complex case that foreshadows the rise of the Third Reich and his future. Series fans will be fascinated to see the central character gradually becoming himself. Steiner writes with grim precision and economy, shooting out short, punchy sentences within short chapters that cast the evil of Nazism in a starkly illuminating light.

A gritty period procedural with a haunting antiwar core.