Silver Pebbles: 2 (Inspector Hunkeler Investigates)

The second in the series featuring Basel police inspector Peter Hunkeler. 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, 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 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 has a wife and children in Turkey. For the courier, finding the stones is a matter of life and death. His employers are on their way to “tidy things up”. For Hunkeler the stones are the only way to get to the people behind the drug trade. They turn out to include not only the bottom-feeding drug gangs but bankers and politicians very high up the Basel food chain. This is a tale of ordinary people accidentally caught in a vortex of crime, like Hank and Jacob in A Simple Plan by Scott Smith or even Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Unusually, and refreshingly, no one gets killed.

Hansjörg Schneider (born 1938) lives in Basel and began his professional career as a journalist and essayist. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed plays and of the bestselling Hunkeler crime series, now with ten titles published. “The Basel Killings” was awarded The Friedrich Glauser Prize, Germany’s most prestigious crime fiction prize.

Mike Mitchell lives in Scotland and has published over eighty translations from German and French, including all the Friedrich Glauser Sergeant Studer novels and Gustav Meyrink's five novels. His translation of Rosendorfer's ‘Letters Back to Ancient China’ won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.