Buckle Up for a Wild Ride of Murder and Snort-Your-Coffee Humor with Karsten Dusse, MURDER MINDFULLY

The classics of darkly funny crime fiction are feeling a bit dated -- who reads Donald Westlake's caper mysteries now? Of course, there are a lot of murder clubs and sleuth clubs overlapping into public television, but a lot of the humor there comes from the slightly worn-out trope of elderly ladies snooping around (hello, Miss Marple) and younger ones tumbling into chaos.

So hurrah for German lawyer and TV writer Karsten Dusse, whose 2019 book Achtsam Morden arrived on the US market this year, thanks to translator Florian Duijsens and Soho Press. Even the title is a very funny tease: MURDER MINDFULLY.

Björn Diemel is a very harassed attorney. Working for a big firm where he's responsible for successful criminal defense of violent offenders and psychopaths (sociopaths? both??), he's clear-eyed about his career: "Even my wife occasionally found my work rather questionable. But explaining our legal system to other people wasn't my job. My job was to exploit that system using every trick in the book. I made my money doing good for bad people."

Even though he knows he's doing exactly the work he's supposed to, and excellently, Diemel gets stressed by all this. Now his wife's fed up, but giving him one last chance -- which he'll grab, because he's desperate to have time with the little daughter he adores (and who he rarely sees already, due to Work).  

Which puts him into sessions with a mindfulness expert, for the sake of all that. Because even when he can spend time with his daughter, his mind is racing for work issues.

Joschka Breitner is more than willing to teach Diemel to pull himself back together through intention, focus, true mindfulness. But you know that thing about unintended consequences? It probably applies. After his first lesson, which even eases the tension in his neck, Diemel is fully appreciative:

"It was to be several weeks, however, before I realized that what Breitner revealed next would become the mantra for my first murder."

After all, when you're responsible for a shady criminal who sees accidental murders along the way as your problem to solve -- and he's "not only a brutal pimp, but also a big drug and arms dealer" -- and Dragan Sergowicz starts interfering with all the commitments to mindfully parenting and being courteous to the menacing mother of your child -- well, what tools are at hand for resolving things? 

It turns out that mindfulness coaching can lead to some very effective solutions! Of course, they might not be legal. Or morally great. But if they work?

Half the fun of this European farce of almost 400 pages is realizing, just a second ahead of Diemel, how he's going to apply his latest mindfulness lesson. Clear the calendar for the weekend, for this very entertaining page turner.

BIG NEWS: MURDER MINDFULLY is a debut, but Soho Press has clearly been working hard at catching up -- and the translation of the next book in this Mindful Murder series,  MY INNER CHILD WANTS TO KILL, will release in August. By then, you may be ready to apply more of the lessons that you and Diemel are painstakingly learning!

 

News! English Translation of BLUE NIGHT, Excellent Police Procedural from Simone Buchholz

German author Simone Buchholz began scooping up major awards in European crime fiction a few years ago, and has an armful of titles -- and US readers this weekend can finally access one in English (lively and smooth translation by Rachel Ward). BLUE NIGHT is one of the most intriguing police procedurals I've read. It caught me within the first few chapters, not for the plot twists (although there are plenty), but for the piercing portraits of what friendship among big-city investigators can mean: having each other's back no matter what, celebrating together, and struggling to endure a high-stress and often high-alcohol life with little sleep and rare praise, in the midst of risk and loss.

Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley loves her job - but she's boxed out of it for now, demoted for having accused a superior of corruption and firing her weapon. So when we meet her trudging away from her broken-down car on a highway, her mood stinks for multiple reasons. It looks like she has an assignment though, if she can get back to the city: A smashed-up man in a hospital, pretty clearly the victim of a criminal-network beat-down, is unconscious and without identification. Her assignment is to figure out who he is and what happened, so the wheels of justice can start to grind.

First, of course, she'd got to find a way back in the darkness. She calls a friend, Faller, who agrees to collect her, but it will take at least an hour for him to reach her, which is why, disgusted and puffing on a cigarette, she's heading west on foot. She admits to herself, "I feel like a cowboy whose horse has been shot." Lucky thing Faller's own beat-up vehicle is temporarily running.

Chastity Riley's friends are mostly messed up right now: Faller himself is clearly having a midlife crisit, Calabretta's in mourning for a departed girlfriend, Klatsche -- whose bed she often shares -- has barely gotten to sleep after a long night at his bar, the Blue Night, and her buddies Carla and Rocco don't drive (and anyway, they're supposed to be taking care of Calabretta in his horrible depression).

When the man in the hospital wakes, he's clearly not interested in helped Chas solve the crime that landed him there. Of more concern is that Faller's midlife crisis seems to be heading into revenge mode, chasing the head of Hamburg's biggest crime/drugs syndicate.

As a group of seasoned investigators, Chas and her friends know Faller's in trouble if he's trying to become a superhero avenger:

I sigh; we clink bottles.

'You're worried about Faller,' [Klatsche] says.

'He's starting to crack up,' I say. 'He feels too strong. It's not good to feel too strong. You forget to take cover. I mean, we've been through all that. ..'

'Has he done anything that could be dangerous yet?'

'No idea,' I say. 'According to Calabretta, he hinted that he's planning something soon.'

Once Chas wins a few words from the man in the hospital, she begins to suspect his beat-down could be related to the same crime operation that her friend Faller is trying to target, run by an Albanian who humiliated Faller in the past. Unexpectedly, the powers that be allow her to step back into a bit more action when they send her to connect with to another police operation, one tracking drugs through the East German badlands, all the way to the Czech border. Yes, overlap, again. Big time.

Buchholz inserts short passages of character comments on their situations, including ones from the criminals involved. Interestingly, they don't slow the pace -- they just deepen the wrinkles and show how the plot is twisting yet again. Looks like Chastity Riley's irascible hospital patient is determined to take a role in the showdown, wheelchair and all. With a little help.

This is a slim crime novel, only 182 pages, but memorable and worth a second reading, too. Many thanks to Orenda Books for bringing it across the Atlantic, and giving us hope of more adept translations of Buchholz's dark and popular Hamburg police investigations.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention, Medieval Mystery by Oliver Pötzsch, THE PLAY OF DEATH

Three reasons to read number six in Oliver Pötzsch's "Hangman's Daughter" series, THE PLAY OF DEATH:

1. You collect the reading experience of mysteries set in Bavaria.
2. You like fiction set in the 1600s.
3. You're planning to see the Bread & Puppet Theater in action in Vermont (or treasure having done so in the past, especially in the 1970s and 1980s).

At the heart of this somewhat awkwardly translated mystery (reminds me of the translation of P.J. Brackston's books, also set in Bavaria) is the annual passion play in Oberammergau -- which in many ways is a precursor to the grand spectacles that Bread & Puppet created. The second strand is what life is like in a caste-conscious society when you're part of a hangman's family.

And the third, of course, is a murder and finding the dangerous criminal responsible.

I'm not going to cover this one in depth -- seems to me if you have one of those reasons, you'll pick up the book, and otherwise, skip it -- but here's the formal description from the Munich-born author's website:

It is 1670 and Simon Fronwieser is in the town of Oberammergau to bring his seven-year-old son to boarding school. As he bids his boy a tearful farewell, news comes of a shocking murder: the man who was to play the part of Christ in the town’s Passion play has been found dead, nailed to the set’s cross. As there is no doctor in town, Simon is brought in to examine the body. The opportunities to spend more time with his son and to investigate the murder quickly convince him to stay.

Soon he is joined by his father-in-law, Jakob Kuisl, the Schongau hangman, and the two begin piecing together the puzzle of the actor’s death. Was he murdered by a jealous rival? Are the recently arrived and unpopular immigrant workers somehow involved? Or is it a punishment from God for the villagers’ arrogance in trying to schedule the play four years earlier than prescribed by ancient custom? Once again it looks like it is up to the Kuisls to unravel the mystery and bring a town’s dark secrets to light.

Brought to the US by Mariner, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt press. (A quick note: Yes, I realize that strictly speaking the 1600s are beyond the medieval period. But trust me, not in this landscape.)

 PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.