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Title details for Silver Pebbles by Hansjörg Schneider - Available

Silver Pebbles

by Hansjörg Schneider
Mike Mitchell
ebook
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A hunt for drug gang diamonds is keeping Basel Inspector Hunkeler on tenterhooks. Basel, nestled at the border of Switzerland with Germany and France, has been hammered by a huge snowstorm, cars and trams can barely move, trees are groaning under the weight of the recent snowfall, the cathedral and city roofs are smothered. 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, Inspector 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 maintenance 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 22, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781913394639

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781913394639
      • File size: 649 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 29, 2021
      At the start of Swiss author Schneider’s subpar prequel to 2021’s The Basel Killings, smuggler Guy Kayat, who’s carrying diamonds worth a million Swiss francs, arrives on a train from Germany at the Basel station. A police team, headed by Det. Insp. Peter Hunkeler, is waiting for him on the platform. The police chase Kayat into a bathroom, where he flushes the diamonds down a toilet just before he’s apprehended. Hunkeler, who’s just a few years away from retirement, must now somehow retrieve the missing diamonds from the sewer and identify the people to whom the diamonds were supposed to be delivered. With leads tenuously connecting the shipment to a powerful businessman, the angst-ridden detective investigates in his unique way (“I think best when I’m asleep”), to his superior’s frustration. The author’s sublime use of stark atmospherics and bleak worldbuilding compensates only in part for the lack of overall tension, a stock world-weary detective, and a predictable conclusion. Readers will hope for a return to form next time.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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