IRON CURTAIN

An American expatriate in East Germany attempts to locate a missing woman in this debut novel.

East Germany, 1987. American-born Adam Hedman has spent the last 10 years in the Communist country, seven of them in prison for breaking a police officer’s jaw. Now he works at a factory in the town of Angermünde, where his Sisyphean task is to shovel unending lorries of coal into a massive furnace. But the day has finally arrived for Adam to fulfill his real purpose: murdering the man who killed his wife. It’s taken years to track him down, and he’ll only be in the area for a night. Adam is so dead-set on completing the job that he won’t even be distracted by the disappearance of Anna Sievers, a local woman who is the sister of Adam’s co-worker Evelyn. Unfortunately, a chance encounter with a skittish teenage hunter in the woods blows a literal hole in Adam’s plan. He wakes up two days later in the house of a Stasi officer—the father of the boy who shot him—recovering from a bullet wound, his target long gone. To make matters worse, Adam’s criminal history makes him a prime suspect in the case of Evelyn’s missing sister. At a police station, Adam “didn’t really know what the file would say himself. But he knew that his stretch in prison would always make him a suspect. No matter in what regard. If someone had stolen a piece of chewing gum in Angermünde, he would have been the first one to be arrested. Even more so regarding the disappearance of a young woman.” Can Adam clear his name without ruining his chances of finally exacting revenge on the man he hates the most? To do so, he’ll have to help Evelyn locate Anna, and it’s a journey that will take him deeper behind the Iron Curtain than he ever could have imagined.

Beuy’s prose is clipped and muscular, befitting both Adam and his chilly environment: “Shoveling coal was as arduous as any other day. The cold did not make it easier or harder. Even the onset of the snow-bringing east wind did nothing to change that. Neither did the prospect of Evelyn’s search drive soon dying out or the adrenaline-fueled trip to the Soviet barracks.” Adam is a man of secrets, and he keeps them from the audience just as readily as he does from everyone else. This makes for a neat puzzle as readers attempt to suss out the particulars of Adam’s motivations and backstory in addition to the disappearance of Anna. The crime is engaging, and there are the expected appearances of the Stasi and the KGB. But the series opener’s most appealing feature is the author’s convincing depiction of East German culture in the ’80s. The enamel factory where Adam is employed is a collective endeavor, more like a commune than a typical 9-to-5 job, and the brooding loner makes for an appealingly ill-suited cog in the cheery socialist machine around him. It will be fun to see how Beuy develops Adam’s world in future volumes.

An engrossing, atmospheric crime thriller set in East Germany.