Skin City

For detective Romina Winter, her transfer to a post in the leafy suburbs of Berlin was supposed to take some of the stress out of her life. But a gang of Georgian thieves have started hitting the stately villas of her precinct on a daily basis. The residents are terrified. And then Romina’s little sister disappears. Suddenly she’s at the centre of her own investigations.

Jacques Lippold has just been released from Berlin’s Tegel prison after serving a two-year stint for fraud. Now he wants to make a name for himself as a financial advisor in the art scene. At private viewings, auctions, and gallery dinners, his charm and his gift of the gab are irresistible. But Lippold also has an old score to settle.

Koba and his lads from Tbilisi have plenty to keep them occupied on the outskirts of Berlin. Every day, they break into at least one apartment, one villa, and take whatever they can get their hands on. Really, though, Koba dreams of making it to Canada. But then he stretches his arm through a smashed window...

Johannes Groschupf, the seismograph of Berlin and three-time winner of the German Crime Fiction Prize, proves his merciless mastery of thrill and suspense in this tour de force, taking readers from the allotment gardens and suburban villas of Berlin to the Waldorf Astoria and the Hotel Adlon.

»Every good thriller has to be political, according to the French Noir pioneer Jean-Patrick Manchette. Johannes Groschupf fulfils this demand in the most subtle way.« Marcus Müntefering, Der Spiegel

»Groschupf writes in clipped, cool prose and has a good ear for dialogue. And you can tell that he knows this world, the margins of society, where the social mores begins to fray.« Peter Körte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung