#BlogTour Blue Night by Simone Buchholz and translated by Rachel Ward. @OrendaBooks @FwdTranslations @ohneklippo #BlueNight

My Review:

I have to admit that I found Blue Night quite hard to get into but I kept going and soon got into the story of Chastity Riley, a prosecutor who is demoted to an office that consists of a desk in a cupboard and the role that nobody wants to do. However it is a role that she happens to be quite good at, managing to get through to a man who has been beaten so badly that his body is broken, he won’t talk to anyone but she chips away and he starts to open up to her.

Chastity finds herself drawn into a case that is nowhere near as dull as she’d expected it to be, and perhaps she can win favours and get back into the meatier jobs that she misses. I loved Chastity’s relationship with the other characters, she has a way of relating to people and although she appears to be very tough and capable, there’s a soft side to her that she sometimes lets others see.

This is the first book that I have read that has been translated from German into English and I have to admit that I’m not sure that it works as well as books that I have read from Iceland/Norway etc. Something didn’t quite flow with the words and I suspect that my dyslexic brain made it harder for me to put the story together and so reading the book took a lot of concentration.

But don’t let that put you off, it’s a fun story that kept me guessing and thinking. Chastity Riley is definitely a great new character that I’m sure will soon have many fans.

Thank you to Orenda Books for a copy of Blue Night. I was under no obligation to review the book and all thoughts are my own.

Blurb:

After convicting a superior for corruption and shooting off a gangster’s crown jewels, the career of Hamburg’s most hard-bitten state prosecutor, Chastity Riley, has taken a nose dive: she has been transferred to the tedium of witness protection to prevent her making any more trouble. However, when she is assigned to the case of an anonymous man lying under police guard in hospital – almost every bone in his body broken, a finger cut off, and refusing to speak in anything other than riddles – Chastity’s instinct for the big, exciting case kicks in. Using all her powers of persuasion, she soon gains her charge’s confidence, and finds herself on the trail to Leipzig, a new ally, and a whole heap of lethal synthetic drugs. When she discovers that a friend and former colleague is trying to bring down Hamburg’s Albanian mafia kingpin single-handedly, it looks like Chas Riley’s dull life on witness protection really has been short-lived… Fresh, fiendishly fast-paced and full of devious twists and all the hard-boiled poetry and acerbic wit of the best noir, Blue Night marks the stunning start of a brilliant new crime series, from one of Germany’s bestselling authors.

About The Author:

I was born in Hanau in 1972 and grew up in Spessart. I studied philosophy and literature, but not until the end.

I was a waitress, columnist and editor. I’m talking about love, death and football, I like Naples, Tahiti, St. Petersburg and basically Brooklyn, but I live in Hamburg, mainly because of the weather.

Always on New Year’s morning I search the port for bottle post. So if you’re stuck somewhere and need rum and cigarettes urgently, try contacting me .

About The Translator:

Having always been an avid reader and enjoyed word games and puzzles, I discovered a flair for languages at school and went on to study Modern Languages at the University of East Anglia. I spent my third year working as a language assistant at two grammar schools in Saarbrücken, Germany. During my final year, I realised that I wanted to put these skills and passions to use professionally and applied for UEA’s MA in Literary Translation. Since then, I have been working in Norwich, UK, as a freelance translator of literary and creative writing from German and French to English.

Blue Night by Simone Buchholz is out now and available from Amazon UK and Amazon US.