Hunkeler, now a retired inspector of the Basel police force, is hospitalized and sharing a room with Stephan Fankhauser, an old acquaintance terminally ill with cancer. One night, a groggy Hunkeler wakes up to see a young nurse administering an injection to his friend. The following day Fankhauser is found dead. There was no autopsy, and Fankhauser was quickly cremated. Hunkeler resolves to get to the bottom of the matter. His maverick investigation will threaten Switzerland's carefully honed reputation of neutrality during WWII.
The fourth in the Inspector Hunkeler series published in English. The first was The Basel Killings published by Bitter Lemon in 2021, winner of the Glauser Prize, Germany’s most prestigious crime fiction award won in 2024 by our own Joachim Schmidt for Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain. The second was Silver Pebbles, a beautifully crafted thriller about stolen diamonds, drug couriers and people accidentally caught in a vortex of crime, and the third, The Murder of Anton Livius, revealed much about the tormented history of Alsace.