Review of Stasi Wolf by David Young (Zaffre, 2017)

East Germany, 1975. In the model new town of Halle-Neustadt twins have been snatched from their parents.  A short time later the baby boy is found dead in a suitcase thrown from a train.  Detective Karin Müller is transferred from Berlin to take over the case.  However, she is prevented from running a normal investigation by the local Stasi office who do not the reputation of a flagship development to be sullied by the abduction or the locals to panic.  Instead, Müller must find creative ways to try and quietly search for the missing baby girl.  The case also reminds Müller of her own aborted twins and raises questions about her own background.  Despite her best efforts, the investigation grinds almost to a halt, then the child snatcher strikes again.  Müller and her team are under pressure to find the culprit and rescue a second child but within the silencing parameters dictated by the Stasi.

Stasi Wolf is the second book in the Karin Müller series set in East Germany in the 1970s.  The premise of trying to find a child abductor in a police state where the Stasi do not want the crime to be publicly known was an interesting one.  However, while there is plenty going on in the plot, with a plethora of feints and turns, there is also too many niggles in the storyline.  For example, there was too much coincidence and telegraphing with respect to Karin’s personal life and history, too much coincidence in the links between Karin and other key characters, and the setup for the denouement was highly staged and fanciful in all aspects.  A key part of the plot premise also felt too contrived - I could see no logical reason why Karin would be bought in to investigate the case other than as a plot device – the same ends would have been achieved by the manipulator by just using the local police force, which is precisely what Karin does.  What keeps the book interesting is a glimpse into East Germany in the 1970s and its social relations and paranoia and resistance, which was nicely done, and the character of Karin Müller, who is determined to succeed as a murder detective despite widespread misogyny and difficult internal politics.  These pluses however are not sufficient to paper over the plotting issues, which is a shame as the series and character that has a lot of potential.

Review of Stasi Child by David Young (twenty7, 2015)

East Berlin, 1974.  Oberleutnant Karin Müller is a detective in the murder squad of the GDR national police. Her marriage is disintegrating and she’s haunted by memories of being raped and the subsequent botched abortion.  When she’s ordered to investigate the death of a teenage girl found near to the Berlin Wall, she knows she’s heading into trouble.  The girl has been recently sexually assaulted, appears to have been escaping from the West to the East, and a high ranking Stasi detective is calling the shots.  He wants her to discover the girl’s identity, but not her killer.  In practice, investigating one means also trying to identify the other.  As she tries to determine who the girl might be it becomes obvious that others would prefer her to make little progress.  In a country where it’s not clear who’s a state agent and a wrong move can make you an enemy of the state, Müller tries to steer a course through murky waters, determined to solve the case and stay alive.

Stasi Child captures well the paranoia, fear and complex power games of the GDR, conveying the sense that even those working in the police and security services, who were most able to abuse their positions, were fearful of how the system could eat its own.  Young illustrates this by entwining two parallel storylines: the first told in the third tense and is set in the present follows Oberleutnant Karin Müller, a young detective who despite her own woes still believes in the ideals of the GDR, who is ordered by the Stasi to identify a teenager whose murder has been staged to look like she was killed trying to flee from the West; the second, told in the first person and set some months earlier charts the harsh regime suffered by Irma Behrendt in a youth detention centre.  Both characters and storylines are compelling, though I initially struggled with the first person tense of the latter.  The tale is atmospheric and plot intriguing.  However, its realism started to waiver as it built towards its denouement, which felt overplayed; both in terms of the wrap-up, but also in the personal ties between the threads -- and the carefully layered police procedural gave way to a thriller.  The final scenes, however, pack a powerful punch.