German author pens a gripping detective novel

The Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus, Minotaur Books 2009 English translation 2014 by Steven T. Murray
The Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus, Minotaur Books 2009 English translation 2014 by Steven T. Murray

There are many reasons to be impressed with The Ice Queen, the third crime detective novel by German author Nele Neuhaus to be translated into English

First, it is an intriguing mystery that pulls you into its labyrinthine story in its first three pages. Something is amiss right away. The perceptive reader will twig to casually adduced, seemingly benign, offhand references that grate just a little bit. Are they clues for larger developments later in the narrative, we are left to wonder? Perhaps.

The promotional material on the book’s jacket cover sets the scene for the prospective reader: wealthy, elderly Holocaust survivor David Yossi Goldberg is found murdered in his home near Frankfurt. A five-digit number is smeared at the murder scene in the victim’s blood. Shockingly, the autopsy on Goldberg’s body discloses an old, partially visible, but unmistakable tattoo on his arm. This tattoo is an identifier of an individual’s blood type etched into the inside of the arm of each member of the Nazi SS. Before any further forensic examinations can be conducted upon Goldberg’s body, his family, accompanied by American and German government officials, swoops into the scene to remove the corpse.

Two other murders of seniors quickly follow. And in each case, the same five-digit number is daubed at the crime scene in the victim’s blood.

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That is the beginning of the tangled skein of undecipherable signs, disturbing developments and sometimes very subtle clues that must be unravelled to solve the murders.

Neuhaus is an experienced author. She has deftly constructed an intricately layered narrative that leads the reader to the story’s final dramatic conclusion through a carefully manicured maze of conundrum and clue. All of the action occurs within a two-week period, and this compacted time frame helps establish an atmosphere of urgency and pressure.

Neuhaus is widely read in Germany, where more than four million copies of her books are currently in print. The Ice Queen follows her crime mysteries Snow White Must Die and Bad Wolf, which have now been translated into English. These books feature her two notable investigative characters, Oliver Von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchoff.

This leads to the second noteworthy aspect of The Ice Queen. Neuhaus’ detectives are very well developed characters, which is not necessarily the norm for murder crime mysteries. Though von Bodenstein and Kirchoff are the police “heroes” of the story, by no means are they heroic in the familiar sense of the term. Neither displays particularly extraordinary traits or qualities. They are entirely “ordinary” human beings, emotionally resilient and responsive at some times, emotionally vulnerable and distant at others. Neither possesses that one great, defining skill or brilliance that leads – as we have so often seen in Hollywood finishes – to the climactic life-saving rescue.

Instead, they are like anyone else plugging away at their work, despite headaches or hangovers or personal trauma at home. The one key difference, however, between their work and the work of most of the rest of us is that theirs leads them into the darkest corners of the world, and they travel mostly in the soul-shattering gutters and other low echelons of human nature.

Like the good detectives they are intended to be, von Bodenstein and Kirchoff constantly hover in the margins of the action, observing, noting, questioning and concluding. They attempt to control the investigation, but they know, in truth, that the constant unfolding of events actually controls them.

The detectives, however, are not the dominant characters in the story. The dominant characters are the individuals affiliated – as family, friends and acquaintances – with a prominent family within German industry, stalwart philanthropists, societal elites whose connections reach across continents. They are the individuals who comprise the large circle of players who stir the story’s many mysteries and orchestrate its multiple murders, the core suspects in the murders and assorted other miscreants.

But darkly kept secrets and deceptions lie hidden deep within the centre of the circle. They have been assiduously interwoven over the years into a mesh that ultimately entraps and destroys all who become caught in its menace and pathology.

And this is the third compelling aspect of the work. The essence of The Ice Queen is the author’s reflection upon the profoundly corrupting, corrosive and self-destructive effect of holding onto and constructing an entire life and personal history based upon a foundation of malevolent intrigue and dark, evil secrets. In the case of The Ice Queen, those guarded falsehoods reach back into the sinister days of the Third Reich.

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For this reader, that was the fourth and most gripping aspect of the book. The story is a personal confrontation by a German author born after World War II with the hideous cruelties wrought by her countrymen fewer than three decades before she was born in 1967. The book examines, with considerable conscience and narrative flair, the unspeakable suffering brought upon the world by the Nazis. It also explores the devastation wrought upon Germans opposed to Nazis.

The Ice Queen powerfully depicts human devastation and suffering in its microcosmic form. The grotesque brutality perpetrated by the Nazis on an entire continent, on their own country, on countless suffering peoples – especially, of course, the Jewish People – can most truly be grasped in the cruelty perpetrated upon specific individuals and their families.

In The Ice Queen, Nele Neuhaus artfully reminds us that the flame that burns deep within the soul seeking justice, seeking to calm an anguish that echoes from a far-away scarred past, cannot be extinguished by deception and guile. Eventually, a house of evil collapses onto itself, toppled by the unbearable weight of its horrific sins.