The Murder of Anton Livius

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...