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...

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...

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 with a ruby ring on her hand administering an injection to his friend. The following day Fankhauser is found dead. Was the injection just a dream?

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...