Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
Bitter Lemon continue their mission to bring us Persons of Interest in international crime fiction with this, the first in the Inspector Hunkeler series (first published in Switzerland in 2004). Schneider has won the prestigious Friedrich Glauser prize for crime fiction, though this is a fairly placid introduction to the series.
Hunkeler, fat, unfit and near retirement, unjustly suspended from a case, continues regardless to explore it. When a couple of “low-life” people are killed in the border town of Basel their murders have something in common: an earring is slashed from their ear lobes. Albanian drug smugglers are assumed to be the culprits – or are they the victims? Are Albanians to blame? Or is there blood on the hands of those in power, who perhaps have more to hide?
