The Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus

Crime novels are my guilty pleasure. Actually, bugger 'guilty'. I shamelessly enjoy them. I have read the majority of the popular crime novel writers, and I have got to the point where I know their plotting style so well that there are no surprises. So, I have been reading translated crime novels this year. The first two I read by Nele Neuhaus were highly entertaining and really kept me going. So I decided to pick up this one - the third in the series.

A 92-year old man is found shot in his house, execution style. He was a renowned Jewish figure, involved in post-war reconciliation  efforts. But his autopsy reveals a secret. Who would have known? And how many more people will need to die before Bodenstein and Kirchhoff solve the murder?

Before I go any further with the review, let me just put this out there. This book was translated in 2015, but the German book was written in 2009 - which means, although this one is marketed as the 3rd in the series, it is actually closer to the first. I say 'closer to', because it is clear from the narrative that there is more story preceding this one, so I am guessing that there is at least one more book before this one. Why am I telling you this? As far as the crime thriller side of this story goes, it is irrelevant. There is enough information to put everything together, you can learn about the characters. Nothing is unpleasantly or jarringly shocking. Having said that. reading them in reverse order does strange things with one's memory. If you are a stickler for wanting to read in chronological order, read this one first. Or... skip this one. While the plot is great, the translation was less so.

I really enjoyed the plot of The Ice Queen. Having said that though, I felt that this one was probably not translated as well as the others I had read in this series. There were places where the use of the pronoun was ambiguous and at least one place where the wrong expression was used. While I was completely immersed in Snow White Must Die and Big Bad Wolf, I did not find that the case with this one. I can't say the plot was at fault, although it did slow down in the middle (a common occurrence for crime novels, as the clues and red herrings need to be found and examined).

Although this is a 4 star plot, the writing knocked it down a notch as it made immersing myself in the story difficult. Therefore, I only gave it 3 stars on Goodreads.