The New Detective

Starred review from September 1, 2019

At the end of the war in 1918, Maximilian Wolf returns to Munich. His sketches of soldiers and people in the street capture life in the battle-scarred postwar city. He gets a job at a newspaper, working beside journalist Sophie Auerbach. Together they chronicle the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis until the newspaper offices are bombed, which brings police detective Willi Geismeier to their doors. Although Max's sketches help identify the bombers, Willi is taken off the case because he is a good detective who opposes criminals and Nazis. Throughout the 1920s, these three people chronicle the abuses and horror of Hitler and his supporters, until Hitler is named chancellor in 1933. All three abruptly disappear when a second newspaper, The Munich Post, is destroyed and the staff sent to Dachau concentration camp. The unconventional story resumes when the Americans arrive in Munich in 1945. In a disturbing, menacing novel featuring courageous, believable characters, former New Yorker cartoonist and author ("Louis Morgon" spy novels) Steiner tells a thought-provoking story of the importance of a free press when a country and its justice system are in upheaval. VERDICT Strongly recommended for all readers interested in this era or in a free press. Fans of Rebecca Cantrell's "Hannah Vogel" series will recognize the bleak atmosphere.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2019
Prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials claimed afterward that the Nazis made their jobs easier with their obsessive record keeping. Atrocities were detailed on signed and dated forms. That compulsiveness is also the key to the criminal behavior exposed by Munich policeman Willi Geismeier, the good cop in this impressive novel. Steiner has pulled off a crime story and a procedural in the frame of a historical novel?in this case, the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Maximilian Wolfe, artist and WWI veteran, is out for an evening with newspaper reporter Sophie Auerbach when the attack comes. There's gunfire. A death. Everyone involved is in some way touched by the ascendant Nazis, and the betrayals and cover-ups that follow reach deeply into the police and the establishment. Geismeier is given the file, and he does such a good job of investigating that he's fired. But he did keep that file, which is useful as G�tterd�mmerung unfolds. A precisely written, carefully plotted novel, all the more dramatic for its understated tone.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2023
In the newest entry to Steiner's remarkable four-book series (which also includes The Inconvenient German, 2022), we get the background story of protagonist Willi Geismeier, a Munich police detective working during and between the World Wars, as well as a new case. The book opens in pre-WWI Munich, with Willi's upbringing, and then moves on to his service in the Great War, his first cop job, and his firing after he identifies a high-ranking Nazi as a killer. While this biographical sequence could have been an essayish bore, it's absolutely magical, like uncovering an exciting, long-lost journal. The detective work begins when Willi, now back on the force, is assigned to investigate thefts of drugs and appliances from a hospital. While working the case, he sits in on lectures about the genetic aspects of criminality and poverty, themes that culminate with the events of Germany's 1932 elections, where eugenics and the idea of a master race loom large. But Willi, described by a colleague as "a sly bastard," holds his own amid the Fascist upheaval.

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October 16, 2023
Steiner’s enthralling fourth outing for Geismeier (after 2022’s The Inconvenient German) revisits the detective’s rookie days with the Munich police. In 1913, a 19-year-old Geismeier, fresh out of the Royal Bavarian Police Academy, is assigned to patrol with old-school cop Werner Heisse, a bully who extorts both pimps and legitimate businesses and isn’t afraid to get his knuckles bloody. The by-the-book Geismeier refuses to go along to get along, generating tensions with his crooked colleague. After Geismeier and Heisse are called to a courtyard where journalist Walther Metzger, an outspoken critic of government corruption, has been beaten to death, Geismeier finds a brass button from a police uniform in Metzger’s apartment. Stymied by Heisse in his efforts to investigate further, Geismeier passes the exam to attain the rank of detective so he can launch an independent probe. It’s shut down by his superiors, however. As WWI comes into view and Geismeier takes on cases including a hospital’s missing drugs and an insurance scam, he begins to suspect a link between all of these crimes—and a line back to Heisse. Steiner once again blends a page-turning plot with an evocative depiction of the period. This is another strong historical mystery from a master of the genre. Agent: John Silbersak, Bent Agency.

November 1, 2023
Munich's mean streets don't toughen up a young police recruit, but World War I does. After three previous mysteries following grim, dedicated German detective Willi Geismeier through the 1920s and into World War II, Steiner's fourth installment takes the reader back to the beginning of Geismeier's career. Hired in 1913 as a patrolman in the Munich police force, Geismeier, 19 and looking like a schoolboy, is partnered with old-school cop Werner Heisse, whose approach to showing him the ropes has a sadistic streak. Through meticulous police work on a corruption case that comes together piece by piece, Geismeier solves the murder of muckraking journalist Walter Metzger, found beaten to death in an alley. While Heisse is awarded a commendation, Geismeier is sent to Belgium to fight in the war. Steiner's title, which has a sly double meaning, introduces a tale that unfolds as a triptych. The plot jumps over the hero's battlefield experience to a hospital in late 1917, where Geismeier is recovering from injuries. The center of the novel is his societal reintegration, which involves family nurturing and intense physical labor. When he returns to the police department, he resembles an old man. What Geismeier has lost in enthusiasm he's made up for in authority. Now he stumbles into a complex case that foreshadows the rise of the Third Reich and his future. Series fans will be fascinated to see the central character gradually becoming himself. Steiner writes with grim precision and economy, shooting out short, punchy sentences within short chapters that cast the evil of Nazism in a starkly illuminating light. A gritty period procedural with a haunting antiwar core.

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