New crime novels
Arc of Suspense

Beach, mountains, balcony: No matter where your holiday takes you, crime thrillers are your best companions. These are about a dead dog, a tattooed floater and missing bitcoins. But they are all stories with plenty of relevance for the present.

By Marit Borcherding

© Argument Verlag mit Ariadne Anne Goldmann, as it says on the Viennese author’s website, worked as a waitress, kitchen help and chambermaid to pay for her education. And she knows the inner workings of prisons from her time as a social worker. So it’s not surprising that her novel Alle kleinen Tiere (All the Little Animals) is about people and milieus that exude the opposite of glamour, but are no less interesting and are presented by the author with a great deal of empathy and psychological depth.

The slowly and subliminally escalating plot revolves around four characters: There’s Tom, whose life has completely fallen apart since he was accused – falsely – of having abused a minor. There’s the saleswoman Rita with her heart in the right place, but a pronounced dog phobia. She ends up in the psychiatric ward and meets Ela, who tells an adventurous story and is terrified of an ominous man who is allegedly after her house. Finally, there’s Marisa, who incessantly strives to climb the professional ladder through excessive conformity and manic athleticism, while also finding the love of her life. She’s introduced with the sentence: “The shortest way home from the studio was through the cemetery.”

They all stumble through their everyday lives on the outskirts of the city and on the fringes of society. They cross paths, caught up in their different fears, which sometimes escalate into delusions. There’s also an old man who dies under mysterious circumstances: We are reading a crime novel here after all. But what is actually far more interesting is how the main characters, who all have more or less to do with his death, gradually work their way out of seemingly hopeless situations and somehow find their peace. “All the little animals ... are eaten by the big ones,” it says on page 76, but here some of these “little animals” fight back against their supposed fate. It’s fitting that the novel begins with a dying dog and ends with a smiling one.

UNENDING FRENZY

© S. Fischer “She was floating on the green water of the canal in her white wedding dress, ... and she had roses in her hair. She gazed up at the sky.” Die Linie zwischen Tag und Nacht (The Line between Day and Night), Roland Schimmelpfennig’s third novel, begins in such a vividly poetic way and immediately pulls readers in. Schimmelpfennig is known primarily as a successful playwright, but not yet as an author of crime stories. This one starts, as is typical of the genre, with a corpse, and the first two pages already reveal almost everything that will follow. It’s about Berlin – the epitome of a permanent party: “It was a cold spring day, and yet the whole city was dancing. May Day, Berlin, techno.” A cast of characters that could hardly be more international: “... a Colombian illustrator and a Croatian roofer and a Portuguese waitress and a Syrian computer scientist and an Indian girl with eyes made up in black and blue.” It’s about drugs, consumed in excess on almost every one of the following 200 pages: “cocaine, MDMA, ketamine, speed, beer and vodka.” Finally, it’s about Tommy, first-person narrator, ex-cop and usually under the influence: “There was a chance I was seeing double, because I had been awake for more than twenty-four hours.”

Why Tommy, once a highly esteemed drug investigator, is no longer working for the police is soon revealed: He had run over a child during a mission – with fatal results. After that he went astray, as they say: career over, relationship shattered, contacts with the Berlin branches of the drug mafia. But the beautiful floating corpse in the canal awakens something in him: Not only does he pull her out of the water. He also wants to save her from oblivion, wants to find out who she is and what name she bears. Can the magic tattoo on the dead woman’s back help him solve the mystery?

Tommy goes on a manic ramble through the night and demimonde of modern-day Berlin – with characters who are stranded here from everywhere and for all kinds of reasons, creating an extremely urban backdrop. Often enough, they first come across as clichés incarnate, but thanks to Schimmelpfennig’s narrative skill, they break away from our expectations and remain interesting, in part because links and relationships have developed among them that function beyond traditional patterns and convey a very contemporary appeal. In the end, Tommy will find answers to his questions, and then it is he who is pulled out of the water on the last page and – perhaps – saved.

treasure hunt 4.0

© Kiepenheuer & Witsch Even the Handelsblatt is enthusiastic: Tom Hillenbrand has succeeded in creating “a masterful portrait of the crypto scene” that “almost casually” conveys basic knowledge about cryptocurrency. An accolade from the financial press – but what about the suspense in Montecrypto? It’s definitely there – Tom Hillenbrand is no newcomer to the thriller business. In addition to culinary thrillers, the ex-Spiegel-online author also successfully writes thrillers that deal with current topics, such as drones and AI.

This time it’s about bitcoins, shitcoins, stablecoins, etc. And it starts off spectacularly: In California – where else? – private investigator Ed Dante is supposed to track down the crypto assets of Greg Hollister. The bitcoin pioneer and very successful start-up entrepreneur crashed his plane over the Gulf of Mexico. Now his sister wants to know how she can get her hands on his crypto millions. Ed Dante, who, with his casual, laconic demeanour, his (self-)ironic tone and his penchant for high-percentage drinks can certainly pass for a descendant of Philip Marlowe, accepts the assignment soon to find himself immersed in the fascinating and terrifying crypto scene: “Technically savvy cypher punks from the libertarian-anarcho-capitalist corner. People who see taxes as theft and schools as re-education camps and think everyone should be allowed to carry a gun,” says Hillenbrand in an interview with DIE ZEIT about his subject. It also reveals explosive social forces: “With bitcoin, a parallel currency is establishing itself that is proliferating completely uncontrolled and is not subject to any democratic regulation.” 

Dante has to experience first-hand that rough customs prevail in this world: Soon he is not only hunting, but being hunted himself. After a short time, however, he is assisted by the congenial reporter Mercy Mondego – a name that sounds like something from the Marvel universe, but which, like Dante’s and, of course, the book’s title, refers to the adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo. And it’s adventurous here too: with video messages from the afterlife, with settings from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, Switzerland, New York and Mexico, with idiosyncratic characters and a Hollywood-style showdown at the end. In the aforementioned ZEIT interview, Hillenbrand says, “A good thriller really needs to end with a bang.” That fits his book, making it excellent holiday reading from which you’ll emerge even smarter than when you dove in.