Swiss Vendetta (2017) by Tracee de Hahn
GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages rated 3.62 by 584 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Brrrr.
Detective Agnes Luthi transfers from financial crimes where she read spreadsheets to homicide in a career move up the pay-grade and at the end of the very day she gets the promotion prepares to drive home near Geneva (Switzerland, not Nebraska) when the winter storm of the century sets in. Just before she gets going a call comes in from Otranto Manor near Lac Leman. A corpse has been found and, as the phone masts go dark, she is the only investigator that the dispatcher can contact. With a big swallow off she goes on her first murder investigation on day one, alone in a white-out blizzard. She has not even yet met your new boss who is now incommunicado.
The weather sweeps in at 100 kilometres an hour closing roads, bringing down power lines, drivers abandon cars on the highway, trucks have jackknifed across traffic lanes, Luthi creeps along, missing the exit, and gingerly working her way back. The Manor is down the steep slope on the lake shore and in this weather it is virtually inaccessible, but needs must, and by baby steps and grasping branches and a few falls, Luthi makes her way down, even as the weather increases in intensity. The wind howls, trees crack and fall, sheets of water lifted by the wind off the lake freeze in the air and strike like shrapnel, flashlight beams are blinding in the swirls of snow, it is only by dumb luck that she comes upon the body where she finds the local plod who arrived before the worst of the storm set in, but his falls en route have deprived him of his torch (lost) and cell phone (crushed). The flares he set out to mark the spot are either blown out or away by the winds. Everything is getting brittle in the Arctic temperature driven by Antarctic winds, including bones.
Plod is totally preoccupied by his wife whom he was told just before his phone perished had gone into premature labour with their first child. He is frantic to turn the investigation over to the homicide squad, having done his job with the flares, and go to the hospital. But there is no squad only Luthi who will not release him, and in any event, he cannot now ascend the slope in the dark night of this perfect storm.
The blizzard is a magnificent character in the early going. There is no need for the characters to go on about being cold, the reader feels it through the prose. But it is soon superseded by the Manor itself, a millennium old castle (aka Old Dark House) with secret passages, hidden stairways, rooms concealed in the fifteen-foot thick walls, a dungeon, and in this storm none of the mod cons like electricity, gas, or telephone work. It is cold, dark, and silent.
What follows is a police procedural as the members of the resident Addams Family are questioned and efforts are made in the isolated circumstances to examine the crime scene and the corpse. As if.
I did think Luthi constant self-absorption with her own personal situation was egotistical and less justified than Plod’s worry about his wife. Her problems are in the past. Why do krimi writers add backstory problems, isn’t a solo murder investigation in the situation hard enough? Indeed this preoccupation is compounded throughout so as to lead to reader indigestion from over plotting. I’ll say that again: it is over plotted. There are so many plot lines that I got confused trying to keep track of them.
But the locale, the situation, the Old Dark House, the cast of characters are well drawn, and maybe the overlarding can be calmed in the next outing, for I assume this is the start of series.
The only other Swiss krimis I recall are the 1970s grim psychological tales of Friedrich Dürrenmatt usually involving unindicted war criminals and the fascist wanna be Friedrich Glauser’s 1930s books set in xenophobic Alpine villages.