What now? Women? Cigarettes? Whiskey? All the livelong day? Richard Ellwanger is at a complete loss as to how to occupy his time from now on, having quit his job as detective chief superintendent after he, Richard »the Third Degree« Ellwanger, Munich’s most successful interrogator, lost it while questioning a suspect.

Then suddenly he gets offered a case in far-off New York: a lady of means has been killed, and her sister and father are accusing her bereaved husband of not being who he says he is. They hire Ellwanger as a private detective. For him this means not only leaving his native Hohenlohe and entrusting his furry housemate Killmousky to the care of his neighbours. It also means adjusting to a big city where he doesn’t really speak the language or know the habits of the high society, and where one potential murderer lives who might be from Ellwanger’s hometown and whose personality increasingly becomes an object of fascination for the former detective.

With her usual linguistic virtuosity, Sibylle Lewitscharoff takes on a genre she, like millions of others, loves: Killmousky is a magnificent detective novel set in New York and rural Hohenlohe, both buried under mountains of snow. A reading pleasure of the highest order.

»In this city everything was in motion, and the winter twinkled and flashed like mad with its zillions of crystals.«