The Basel Killings

The Basel Killings PDF Author: Schneider Hansjörg
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
ISBN: 1913394557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
STARRED REVIEW "Swiss author Schneider’s excellent first mystery and series launch...gripping, plausible debut bodes well for future entries." Publishers Weekly---------- It is the end of October, the city of Basel is grey and wet. It could be December. It is just after midnight when Police Inspector Peter Hunkeler, on his way home and slightly worse for wear, spots old man Hardy sitting on a bench under a street light. He wants to smoke a cigarette with him, but the usually very loquacious Hardy is silent—his throat a gaping wound. Turns out he was first strangled, then his left earlobe slit, his diamond stud stolen. The media and the police come quickly to the same conclusion: Hardy’s murder was the work of a gang of Albanian drug smugglers. But for Hunkeler that seems too obvious. Hardy’s murder has much in common with the case of Barbara Amsler, a prostitute also found killed, with an ear slit and pearl stud missing. He follows his own intuition and the trail leads him deep into an edgy world of bars, bordellos and strip clubs, but also into the corrupt core of some of Basel’s political and industrial elite. More ominously, he will soon discover the consequences of certain events in recent Swiss history that those in power would prefer to keep far from the public eye.

The Basel Killings

The Basel Killings PDF Author: Schneider Hansjörg
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
ISBN: 1913394557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
STARRED REVIEW "Swiss author Schneider’s excellent first mystery and series launch...gripping, plausible debut bodes well for future entries." Publishers Weekly---------- It is the end of October, the city of Basel is grey and wet. It could be December. It is just after midnight when Police Inspector Peter Hunkeler, on his way home and slightly worse for wear, spots old man Hardy sitting on a bench under a street light. He wants to smoke a cigarette with him, but the usually very loquacious Hardy is silent—his throat a gaping wound. Turns out he was first strangled, then his left earlobe slit, his diamond stud stolen. The media and the police come quickly to the same conclusion: Hardy’s murder was the work of a gang of Albanian drug smugglers. But for Hunkeler that seems too obvious. Hardy’s murder has much in common with the case of Barbara Amsler, a prostitute also found killed, with an ear slit and pearl stud missing. He follows his own intuition and the trail leads him deep into an edgy world of bars, bordellos and strip clubs, but also into the corrupt core of some of Basel’s political and industrial elite. More ominously, he will soon discover the consequences of certain events in recent Swiss history that those in power would prefer to keep far from the public eye.

Silver Pebbles

Silver Pebbles PDF Author: Hansjörg Schneider
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913394622
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The second in the series featuring Basel police inspector Peter Hunkeler. An elegant young Lebanese man carrying diamonds in his bag is on the train from Frankfurt to Basel, a drug mule on the return journey. At the Basel train station, Hunkeler is waiting for him after a tipoff from the German police. The courier manages to get to the station toilet and flushes the stones away. Erdogan, a young Turkish sewage worker, finds the diamonds in the pipes under the station. To him they mean wealth and the small hotel he always wanted to buy near his family village. To his older Swiss girl-friend Erika, employed at a supermarket checkout counter, the stones signify the end of their life together. She knows that Erdogan has a wife and children in Turkey. For the courier, finding the stones is a matter of life and death. His employers are on their way to "tidy things up". For Hunkeler the stones are the only way to get to the people behind the drug trade. They turn out to include not only the bottom-feeding drug gangs but bankers and politicians very high up the Basel food chain. This is a tale of ordinary people accidentally caught in a vortex of crime, like Hank and Jacob in A Simple Plan by Scott Smith or even Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Unusually, and refreshingly, no one gets killed.

The Murder of Anton Livius

The Murder of Anton Livius PDF Author: Hansjorg Schneider
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
ISBN: 1913394883
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Inspector Hunkeler is summoned back to Basel from his New Year holiday to unravel a gruesome killing in a community 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 wounds from the Second World War have never healed. Series: The third in the Inspector Hunkeler series published in English. The first was The Basel Killings published by Bitter Lemon in 2021, winner of the Friedrich Glauser Prize, Germany’s most prestigious crime fiction award. The second was Silver Pebbles, a beautifully crafted thriller about stolen diamonds, drug couriers and people accidentally caught in a vortex of crime. Character-driven: Hunkeler is close to retirement age, gruff, intuitive, and endowed with a deep sense of psychology and a horror of social injustice. “Reminiscent of Wallander and Rebus, a little jaded, a bit rebellious and always independent with a strong intuition." said the Financial Times. It feels like Hunkeler investigates mostly by spending time in the bars and inns of his beloved city and neighbouring Alsace where he shares a small farmhouse with his long-suffering ‘girlfriend’ Hedwig. Sense of place: It is a harsh winter with unusually heavy snowfall and persistent sub-zero temperatures. 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. As an outsider, Hunkeler is alive to class differences and social milieux. The contrast between the xenophobia of the local police and the Swiss press and the desperate, often lonely, world of Balkan and other immigrants informs the story.

Murder on the Quai

Murder on the Quai PDF Author: Cara Black
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616956798
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The world knows Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc, heroine of 15 mysteries in this New York Times bestselling series, as a très chic, no-nonsense detective—the toughest and most relentless in the City of Lights. Now, author Cara Black dips back in time to reveal how Aimée first came to inherit Leduc Detective . . . November 1989: Aimée Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris’s preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father, who runs the family detective agency. But the week the Berlin Wall crumbles, so does Aimée’s life as she knows it. First, someone has sabotaged her lab work, putting her at risk of failing out of the program. Then, she finds out her aristo boyfriend is getting engaged to another woman. And finally, Aimée’s father takes off to Berlin on a mysterious errand. He asks Aimée to help out at the detective agency while he’s gone—as if she doesn’t already have enough to do. But the case Aimée finds herself investigating—a murder linked to a transport truck of Nazi gold that disappeared in the French countryside during the height of World War II—has gotten under her skin. Her heart may not lie in medicine after all—maybe it’s time to think harder about the family business.

Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany

Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Joy Wiltenburg
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081393303X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.

Silver Pebbles

Silver Pebbles PDF Author: Hansjörg Schneider
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
ISBN: 1913394638
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
A hunt for drug gang diamonds is keeping Basel Inspector Hunkeler on tenterhooks. Basel, nestled at the border of Switzerland with Germany and France, has been hammered by a huge snowstorm, cars and trams can barely move, trees are groaning under the weight of the recent snowfall, the cathedral and city roofs are smothered. An elegant young Lebanese man carrying diamonds in his bag is on the train from Frankfurt to Basel, a drug mule on the return journey. At the Basel train station, Inspector Hunkeler is waiting for him after a tipoff from the German police. The courier manages to get to the station toilet and flushes the stones away. Erdogan, a young Turkish sewage maintenance worker, finds the diamonds in the pipes under the station. To him they mean wealth and the small hotel he always wanted to buy near his family village. To his older Swiss girl-friend Erika, employed at a supermarket checkout counter, the stones signify the end of their life together. She knows that Erdogan has a wife and children in Turkey. For the courier, finding the stones is a matter of life and death. His employers are on their way to “tidy things up”. For Hunkeler the stones are the only way to get to the people behind the drug trade. They turn out to include not only the bottom-feeding drug gangs but bankers and politicians very high up the Basel food chain.

Restless

Restless PDF Author: William Boyd
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408835185
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre

The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre PDF Author: Vilho Shigwedha
Publisher: BASLER AFRIKA BIBLIOGRAPHIEN
ISBN: 3905758806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
It took the former South African Defence Force (SADF) less than four hours to kill more than eight hundred Namibian refugees at Cassinga on May 4, 1978. Thousands of survivors were left with irreparable physical and emotional injuries. The unhealed trauma of Cassinga, a Namibian civilian camp in southern Angola before the massacre, is beyond the worst that the victims of the attack experienced on the ground. Unacceptable layers of pain and suffering continue to grow and multiply as the victims’ grievances and other issues arising out of the aftermath of the massacre have been ignored, particularly following Namibia’s political independence. In this book, the afterlife of the victims’ traumatic memories and their aspiration for justice vis-à-vis the perpetrators’ enjoyment of blanket impunity from prosecution, in spite of their ongoing denial of killing and maiming innocent civilians at Cassinga, are explored with the aim to create public awareness about the unfortunate circumstances of the Cassinga victims.

M, King's Bodyguard

M, King's Bodyguard PDF Author: Niall Leonard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524749060
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A thrilling, "action-packed page-turner" (Wall Street Journal) based on a true story of anarchy and assassination in Edwardian London, centred around one detective’s mission to preserve the life of his king and prevent a bloody war in Europe. From humble beginnings in Ireland, William Melville has risen through hard work, intelligence, and occasional brute force to become head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, personal bodyguard to Queen Victoria and her family, and the scourge of anarchists at home and abroad. But when the aged Queen dies in January 1901 and the crowned heads of Europe converge on London for her funeral, Melville learns of a conspiracy, led by a mysterious nihilist known only as Akushku, to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany at the ceremony. Racing to prevent the atrocity, Melville and his German counterpart Gustav Steinhauer find themselves tangled in a web of adultery, betrayal, and violence. As the funeral looms ever closer, Melville realizes that Akushku is the most resourceful and vicious foe he has yet encountered—but is the greater threat from Melville’s enemies, or his allies?

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox PDF Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Publisher: Tinder Press
ISBN: 0755372263
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
From the Costa Award winning, bestselling author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. 'Unputdownable' Ali Smith Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?