Cay Rademacher books in order

Hamburg, 1947

A ruined city occupied by the British, who bombed it, experiencing the coldest winter in living memory. Food and supplies are rationed; refugees and the homeless are crammed into concrete bunkers and ramshackle huts; trade on the black market is rife. A killer is on the loose, and all attempts to find him or her have failed.

Plagued with worry about his missing son, Frank Stave is a career policeman with a tragedy in his past that is driving his determination to find the killer. With frustration and anger mounting in an already tense city, Stave is under increasing pressure to find out why - in the wake of a wave of atrocity, the grim Nazi past and the bleak attempts by his German countrymen to recreate a country from the apocalypse - someone still has the stomach for murder.

Hamburg, 1948

It is a year of extremes. After a bitterly cold winter of starvation, the bombed city groans under excruciating heat. And Chief Inspector Frank Stave is confronted with a new case.

In the ruins of a shipyard, the corpse of a boy is found and Stave's hunt for the killer leads him into the world of "wolf children" - orphaned children who have fled from the Occupied Eastern Territories and are now united in gangs.

When two more bodies are discovered Stave is under even increasing pressure as he struggles to keep his personal life together too . . .

Hamburg, 1948

In a routine operation, Chief Inspector Frank Stave is shot down. He survives, but transfers from the murder commission to the office combatting the black market. There, Stave is confronted with an enigmatic case: Trummerfrau, women helping to clear rubble from Hamburg's bombed streets, discover works of art from the Weimar period - right next to a unidentified corpse.

Shortly afterwards, mysterious banknotes whose existence disturbs the Allies' secret plans begin to pop up on the black market. The Supervisor soon discovers strange parallels between the two cases. With the introduction of a new currency, Stave thinks he is on the brink of a solution. But the truth is dangerous, and not just for him.

Capitaine Roger Blanc, an investigator with the anti-corruption-unit of the French Gendarmerie, was a bit too succesful in his investigations. He finds himself removed from Paris to the south of France, far away from political power. Or so it would seem.

The stress is too much for his marriage, and he attempts to manage the break up while trying to settle into his new life in Provence in a 200-year-old, half-ruined house. At the same time, Blanc is tasked with his first murder case: A man with no friends and a lot of enemies, an outsider, was found shot and burned. 

When a second man dies under suspicious circumstances in the quaint French countryside, the Capitaine from Paris has to dig deep into the hidden, dark undersides of the Provence he never expected to see.

August: the air over Provence shimmers in suffocating heat. Capitaine Roger Blanc and his colleague Marius Tonon are called to the Camargue. A black fighting bull has escaped from the pasture and has gored a cyclist. A bizarre accident, or so it initially seems. Until Blanc discovers evidence that someone left the gate open intentionally…

The deceased is Albert Cohen, political magazine reporter, fashion intellectual from Paris, TV personality. He was in the Camargue to write a major article on Vincent van Gogh. Yet what has that got to do with the attack? Blanc comes across Cohen’s incomplete report during his investigation, which is not quite as harmless as it initially appeared. 

And also a spectacular, never solved burglary on the Côte d'Azur, and an old, deadly story that absolutely everyone wants to forget. By the end, Blanc feels a little more at home in his new surroundings in Provence. But he pays a high price for it.