Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

German crime fiction

Original title – Hotel Cartagena

Translator Rachel ward

Source – Personal copy

I had read this last year when it was shortlisted for the translated crime prizes, but. I never got around to reviewing it. So when the first week of this year, GHerman lit month is m, meant to be a crime, I rarely follow Lizzy and Caroline’s prompts, but I will join in for once. This is part of a series of novels about a Prosecutor in Hamburg. But the novels seem to all be able to be read as stand-alone other than maybe knowing some of the characters a little more than if this is the book you start with, it works as a stand-alone read. We find out when the Prosecutor, Chastity Riley, the star of the series of books, is caught up when twenty heavily armed men storm into the hotel bar where she is at a birthday party.

He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll.

He had spent all his money on the girl.

Elisabeth or whatever her name was.

Hed met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez to-gether.

The book takes us back to 84 had pick this as i love Henry Rollins

The hotel is owned by Konrad Hoogsmart, and it is him the heavily armed men have come to deal with as they have been sent by people he has in the past destroyed their lives. This is a book that has a clever style as each chapter is a little story in itself as we move through time and place to piece together the slow picture of the event that led to the hostage-taking over the years and around the world from the eighties when a young man now one of the hostages take left Hamburg to head to Columbia and then is now back seeking Hoogsmart whose hotel is named the Cartagena where the events of years ago had these two men following different paths that lead to the evening and the party that Chastity and her friends find themselves in as views but also hostages what will happen to them all what brought this all about ?

They ate dinner together in one of the expensive restaurants in the old town. Henning, José and this man, whose name was Esteban. He was a good head and shoulders taller than all the other Colombians Henning knew, those little men with hearty laughter in their faces. Esteban didn’t actually look like a Colombian at all, more like someone from Madrid. He looked like a torero. Long and slim and knife-sharp. His hands were something like a fan of scissors.

But he was very polite.

He wanted to know how Henning liked it in Cartagena, why hed left his home, what he liked to do in his spare time. And he was very interested in Hamburg and in the people there.

Lots of artists?

Musicians?

Jet set?

People with money?

Years later in Colubia the seeds of the hostage taking are sown.

I loved her style of writing. It is great for a backstory, which, in a way, is the central part of the book. The events that lead to the present are often missed in Crime fiction. In a way, this could have been an even bigger book than it was. It has a clever mix of humour, darkness, and menace. It also captures how one man’s life led him to be the hostage taker and take a face to the faceless. I think this is something modern crime is doing well I know a couple of recent tv series have taken the thieves as the main characters, I think the Sopranos and The wire were forerunners of this as the made the criminals as well as the detectives both as characters and there lives are shared. This is what we have here in the book: the past of the Hostage taker’s life from Hamburg through Columbia, then hiding in Curacao to the return, and the present, about Chastity and the other hostages at the birthday party. I think Rachel has captured this book so well in its tone in English. It is an exciting book by a writer, along with many other books in the series.  Have you read any books from Simone Buchholz or Orenda ?