Hansjörg Schneider, Silver Pebbles (1993).
Good Reads meta-data is 183 pages, rated 3.58 by 189 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Swiss.
Verdict: Bah.
Tagline: Bah!
Liked descriptions of winter weather, city, train station, and the Rhine River…. Also liked the personalities of the supermarket check-out woman and her de facto: She practical and down to earth; He a dreamer who thinks he is smarter than he is. In fact he is almost too dumb to believe.
Didn’t like Inspector Grump’s constant whining and whingeing, and feeling sorry for himself. Nor the aggressive verbal relations he applied to his squad members and they reciprocated. Repetitive blaming all ills and woes on unnamed ‘higher ups.’ I suppose the author thinks that is social criticism, but it is not. It is just lazy carping. He should read some Michel Foucault.
Very little detecting or police work, and ever more padding about snow, interspersed with Inspector Grumble’s simple-minded monologues on the idiocracy of everyone else in the Ruling Class/Deep State.
The Basel train station has an unusual history in World War II, and that fact always makes me receptive to novels set that city. The station was split, half administered by Nazis and half by Swiss. I read a thriller that started there, see: https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/2021/09/target-switzerland-a-novel-of-political-intrigue-2020-by-william-walker/. I read that earlier book because I had found an intriguing reference to this railway station schizophrenia. Nothing about that in this pot simmerer which did not reach a boil.