Read more
Kim Hays' second novel serves us a suspicious drowning, ugly secrets, and unresolved romantic tension . . .
Walking his dog along Bern's Aare river on an icy November night, a surgeon in his seventies is hit in the face and thrown into the river to drown. When his bruised corpse is found, his watch is missing. A mugging gone wrong? The more Swiss police detective Giuliana Linder and her assistant Renzo Donatelli learn about Johann Karl Gurtner, the more convinced they are that his death was not random.
Talking to Gurtner's family raises as many questions as it answers, but one thing becomes clear: the surgeon's relationship with his middle son, Markus, was grim. Tracking others who might have had reason to hate Gurtner, Giuliana and Renzo find themselves once again dealing with their attraction to one another and their ambivalence about having an affair.
Behind their investigation, another story has been unfolding. During the year leading up to Gurtner's death, his son Markus became friends with a former classmate of his father's from the village where the two men grew up. Unlike the privileged young Gurtner, Jakob Amsler was forcibly removed from his mother at nine and contracted to live and work on a village farm. From Jakob, Markus learns that his father's early life contains some very odd secrets-secrets that Giuliana and Renzo are now trying to uncover.
About the author
Kim Hays, a citizen of Switzerland and the United States, has written four Polizei Bern books featuring Swiss homicide detectives Linder and Donatelli. She moved to Bern, her Swiss husband’s hometown, thirty-seven years ago, after growing up in San Juan and Vancouver and studying at Harvard and Berkeley. In Switzerland, she worked as a cross-cultural coach for multinational companies before becoming a mystery writer. The first Linder and Donatelli book,
Pesticide (2022), was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery. It was followed by
Sons and Brothers (2023), A
Fondness for Truth (2024), which was a BookLife Editor’s Pick, and now,
Splintered Justice.
Report
Hays makes sure that the historical aspects of the story are as compelling as the murder mystery at its heart. . . A smart Swiss procedural that keeps its mystery ticking. Kirkus Reviews
