The latest in the international crime series featuring Inspector Peter Hunkeler, to follow on from the success of prize-winning The Basel Killings and Silver Pebbles, selected by the FT as a thriller of the month. 

Hunkeler is a legendary figure in German language crime fiction, often compared to Simenon, gruff, intuitive, endowed with a deep sense of psychology and a horror of social injustice.

The city of Basel and neighbouring Alsace are evoked with great love by Schneider, who in real life lives on the same street and frequents the same bars and restaurants as Inspector Hunkeler. 

Inspector Hunkeler is summoned back to Basel from his New Year holiday to unravel a gruesome killing in an allotment garden on the city’s outskirts. An old man has been shot in the head and found in his garden shed hanging from a butcher’s hook.

Hunkeler must deal not only with the quarrelsome tenants of the garden but with the challenges of investigating a murder that has taken place outside his jurisdiction, across the French border in Alsace.  The clues lead to the Emmental in Berne, and then to Alsace where events from the Second World War have left wounds that never healed.