Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Chastity Riley and her colleagues gather in a hotel bar twenty floors above Hamburg to celebrate a birthday party. Their evening is interrupted by a gang of armed men out to get revenge on one of the city's richest men. As the tension rises Chastity struggles with a sepsis infection that makes an already strange situation positively surreal.
Simone Buchholz has taken one of the thriller genre's favourite set-pieces, the hostage situation, and given it a new twist. The result is a narrative that twists its serpentine way through flashbacks to explain how the hostage takers needed up forcing one of Hamburg's leading citizens to stuff himself with sausages live on social media.
It is almost like the literary equivalent of what might happen were film noir and European art house cinema to meet up to re-imagine Die Hard.
Although she plays fast and loose with one of its favourite tropes Simone Buchholz still manages to deliver a well-executed piece of genre storytelling. The crimes and betrayals that have brought the protagonists to this point are all too believable.
This is a clever and stylishly written thriller from a writer who has already built a formidable reputation in her native Germany. Hopefully this translation will bring Simone Buchholz the wider audience she richly deserves.
Editor's note: translated by Rachel Ward
