Blue Night: Volume 1 (The Chastity Riley)

State prosecutor Chastity Riley has been sidelined to prevent her from causing trouble, but her new job turns out to be far from dull when she finds herself involved in taking down an Albanian mafia kingpin. First in an addictive new series from the Queen of Krimi.

‘Stripped back in style and deadpan in voice, Blue Night is a scintillating romp around the German criminal underworld and back’ Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

'By turns lyrical and pithy, this adventure set in the melting pot of contemporary Hamburg has a plot and a sensibility that both owe something to mind-altering substances. Lots of fun’ Sunday Times

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The career of Hamburg’s most hard-bitten state prosecutor, Chastity Riley, has taken a nose dive: she has been transferred to the tedium of witness protection to prevent her making any more trouble. However, when she is assigned to the case of an anonymous man lying under police guard in hospital, Chastity’s instinct for the big, exciting case kicks in.

Using all her powers of persuasion, she soon gains her charge’s confidence, and finds herself on the trail to trouble…

Fresh, fiendishly fast-paced and full of devious twists and all the hard-boiled poetry and acerbic wit of the best noir, Blue Night marks the stunning start of a brilliant new crime series, from one of Germany’s bestselling authors.

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‘Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-is sense of time and space. Blue Night is a palpable hit’ Independent

‘Disgraced state prosecutor Chastity Riley chases round the dive bars of the port city pursuing and being pursued by a beguiling cast of cops, criminals and chums, delivering scalding one-liners as she goes’ The Times

‘Blue Night has great sparkling energy, humour and stylistic verve … and the story itself is gripping and pacey’ Rosie Goldsmith, European Literature Network

‘A must-read, stylish and highly original take on the detective novel, written with great skill and popping with great characters’ Judith O’Reilly, author of Killing State

'Constantly surprising, Blue Night is an original, firecracker of a read' LoveReading

‘If Philip Marlowe and Bernie Gunther had a literary love child, it might just explain Chastity Riley – Simone Buchholz’s tough, acerbic, utterly engaging central character’ William Ryan

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz’s Blue Night was awarded the Crime Cologne Award, and runner-up for the German Crime Fiction Prize. The next in the Chastity Riley series, Beton Rouge, won the Radio Bremen Crime Fiction Award and Best Economic Crime Novel 2017, and Mexiko Street (published in 2020 by Orenda Books) won the most prestigious crime fiction award in Germany in 2019. Simone lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.