Violetta     by Pieke Bierman, Translated by I Rieder and J Hannum Original language: German Published by Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 7.83 x 5.01 ISBN: 1852422890 List Price: $13.99, £8.90 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.90 Buy online from Amazon.com for $13.99 Published by Serpent's Tail Mask Noir Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

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Violetta is a crime novel set in Berlin in 1990, the year of German reunification and a year after the wall had come down. Berlin had been a strange enough place even before that: geographically closer to Poland than to the rest of West Germany, you could not leave the city by surface routes without passing through East Germany and obtaining a transit visa. Buses terminated right in front of the wall. It felt special and strangely significant to be there, having history, in the shape of the wall, right in your face.

The collapse of the wall came, amongst other things, as a bit of an anticlimax: with East and West Berlin rehearsing the reunification of the rest of Germany, political significance made way for problems of a socioeconomic and, reportedly, emotional nature, all in all resulting in quite a mess. Berlin is in a position without historical precedent, but at the same time conscious that the way it develops will have an influence on the identity of the whole of Germany.

Considering this setting, it is not surprising that Violetta strays from the conventional path of the crime genre. We don’t get the usual pattern of a murder, followed by a subsequent identification, chase and capture of the baddy, with perhaps a motive and a psychological profile thrown in. Violetta is less akin to traditional crime novels than to the more sophisticated brand of TV crime series like Homicide. In fact ‘Homicide and Organised Crime’ is the name of the police department headed by Chief Inspector Karin Lietze. Returning from holiday, she finds to her dismay that none of the cases have cleared themselves up during her absence, instead, they seem to have become more insoluble than ever.

There is the ‘rubberstamp’ murderer, a serial killer who prints a letter on the forehead of each of his female victims, according to their nationality: P for Polish, T for Turkish and so on.

But men have no reason to sleep quietly either in Biermann’s Berlin: several of them are found dead in their beds, killed after having had sex with their murderer.

How does the violent women’s organisation, the ‘JoAnne Little Brigade’ fit into all this? And who is the mysterious Violetta, who wears the tightest trousers in Berlin and does not come over as exactly ordinary, to say the least?

‘Black! The stretch pants. No t-shirt, no slogan. But? The patent leather bodice. The transparent blouse over it like a jacket. Open. Trompe l’oeil. No jewellery. No violet. Just the shoes. The open-toed high heels that obscenely reveal the cleavage between big toe and the next one. And her fingernails. Each a different shade of purple, and one in red and one in blue.’

All these cases link up, but that doesn’t mean everything falls into place, and although at the end of the book things clear somewhat, they still feel far from resolved.

But how can everything be explained, resolved, especially in Berlin A.D. 1990? Just as the characters in Pieke Biermann’s book, especially Chief Inspector Lietze, grapple with the fact that the restoring of order might be an impossibility per se, this is only appropriate for a story set in Berlin, a city that, in 1990 as well as today, has not found a concept of normality.

‘And at some point, at some point all the knots will come undone. At some point, all the scraps of evidence will fall into place and the puzzle will be solved. And then you’ll see, Lietze Karin, that the only connection between all these cases which have been wearing out your last ounce of grey matter all these months is this city, these times and this weather! The Zeitgeist — the spirit of the age — pure shit! These times don’t have spirit. This city is a pressure cooker in the middle of a sea, in which a few waves ripple and spill over. It’s time for the lid to come off.’ p222