The first in a series that’s been wildly popular in Germany is an excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the...
Welcome to Berlin in the 1920s: a city filled with vice, violence, greed, corruption, and political mayhem.
Detective Inspector Gereon Rath is forced to leave the Cologne homicide squad after he accidentally kills a man. His well-connected father gets him a job with the Berlin vice squad, led by avuncular DCI Bruno Wolter. A raid on a porn studio almost gets Rath killed but nets vice a new informant, a junkie who will feature in Rath’s future cases. Berlin is full of Russians representing every point on the political spectrum, and after vice joins the police action to contain a communist May Day celebration, Rath, who longs to be back in homicide solving real crimes, decries politics to his boss. When an unidentified man is found badly mutilated in a car in a canal, Rath secretly works the case as he pursues his other duties. At the scene is Charly Ritter, law student and stenographer from the homicide division. Her mutual attraction with Rath quickly leads to an affair. Through his investigation of his vice and murder cases, Rath learns of a secret shipment of Russian gold that communists, Nazis, and gangsters are all desperate to find. In a strange twist of fate, Rath accidentally kills another criminal. Determined not to suffer the same fate he did last time, he hides the body and is assigned to find the killer once it is discovered. The life-and-death political battles over the soul of Germany are a major hindrance to Rath’s search for solutions to several interconnected crimes.
The first in a series that’s been wildly popular in Germany is an excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimar Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-910124-97-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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