In his third case, Josef Maria Stachelmann is thrown back into his own past and investigates a murder in a »Thingstead«, once inaugurated by Josef Goebbels.
It’s past midnight when Chief Commissioner Carmen Hebel rings Stachelmann’s doorbell. She has terrible news for Stachelmann: Ossi is dead. Oskar Winter was her colleague and Stachelmann’s friend. He has been found dead at his desk, his head lying on a folder containing pamphlets, newspaper cuttings and records dating back to the seventies when Ossi and Stachelmann studied together in Heidelberg and still believed in the revolution. Everything points to suicide. But Stachelmann is sceptical. The folder on Ossi’s desk provides a clue. He finds out that Ossi visited Heidelberg shortly before his death, apparently to investigate a crime committed almost thirty years ago: the »thingstead« murder. Was Ossi killed because he had come too close to the perpetrators? Have the thingstead murderers struck a second time? Are they out to kill Stachelmann? He discovers that the dead aren’t dead at all, and hardly anyone is telling the truth.
In the third part of his Stachelmann series, Christian v. Ditfurth proves once again that he is a master of the sophisticated detective novel. According to the press: »This involuntary investigator and his author are some of the best things the German mystery scene currently has to offer.«
