The Basel Killings

by Hansjörg Schneider, Mike Mitchell (Translator)

Overview

STARRED REVIEW "Swiss author Schneider’s excellent first mystery and series launch...gripping, plausible debut bodes well for future entries." Publishers Weekly———— It all begins with two murders, an old man found dead on a street bench in Basel and a prostitute pulled out of a nearby lake. Both strangled and both found with their left earlobes slit. Inspector Hunkeler of the Basel police investigates and is soon faced with the consequences of certain recent events in Swiss history that everyone wants to keep buried.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913394547
Publisher:	Bitter Lemon Press, Ltd
Publication date:	07/20/2021
Series:	The Inspector Hunkeler Series , #1
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Hansjörg Schneider (born 1938) lives in Basel and began his professional career as a journalist and essayist. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed plays and of the bestselling Peter Hunkeler crime series, now with ten titles published. “The Basel Killings” was awarded The Friedrich Glauser Prize, Germany’s most prestigious crime fiction prize.

Mike Mitchell lives in Scotland and has published over eighty translations from German and French, including all the Friedrich Glauser Sergeant Studer novels and Gustav Meyrink's five novels. His translation of Rosendorfer's ‘Letters Back to Ancient China’ won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/31/2021

At the start of Swiss author Schneider’s excellent first mystery and series launch, Peter Hunkeler, an inspector with the Basel City criminal investigation department, stops to relieve himself on a tree after leaving a bar. He spots an acquaintance, an “old vagabond” known as Hardy “who always had a diamond in his left earlobe,” sitting on a nearby bench. When Hunkeler approaches Hardy, who doesn’t respond to the inspector’s efforts at conversation, Hunkeler discovers Hardy has been strangled and the diamond cut out of his ear. The murder resembles one of Hunkeler’s open cases—the strangling, several months earlier, of a prostitute whose ear was slashed to remove a pearl stud. Hunkeler, who takes the deaths personally, finds himself at odds with his bosses and at risk of losing his job when he dissents from the theory that the killings were related to the city’s drug-trafficking by Turks and Albanians. Schneider makes his flawed protagonist relatable and the truth behind the murders satisfyingly surprising. This gripping, plausible debut bodes well for future entries. (July)

Publishers Weekly

STARRED REVIEW: "Swiss author Schneider’s excellent first mystery and series launch...gripping, plausible debut bodes well for future entries." Publishers Weekly
“Schneider has created a wonderful protagonist: gnarly, edgy and sympathetic. “ Hamburger Abendblatt

“Not a word too many, but also not a word too few”. Rheinische Post

From the Publisher