The long wait is over – Detective Hunkeler is back on the job. Albeit very reluctantly.

The tenth case in the best-selling Hunkeler series.

A peaceful sunny morning in Basel’s Kannenfeld Park. A sudden scream disturbs Peter Hunkeler’s first coffee of the day: someone has found a dead body behind the bushes.
He may be in retirement, but a policeman is always a policeman, at least for other people. So Hunkeler has to take a look. And he realizes he knows the dead man: a well-known journalist and art critic.

Peter Hunkeler, now a retired inspector of the Basel police force, hospitalized following surgery and shared the room with an old acquaintance: Stephan Fankhauser, a colourful character. Once a wild member of the 1968 student movement, over the course of the years he made his way through the institutions and became director of a bank. Now Fankhauser is seriously ill. One night, Hunkeler had just been given a sleeping pill, he noticed a nurse with a ruby ring on her hand administering an injection to the fellow patient. Strangely, Fankhauser is resisting it intently. And does not the night nurse usually wear a diamond ring? The next morning, when Hunkeler wakes up, Fankhauser is dead. Was it all just a dream? Hunkeler is not sure, but he resolves to get to the bottom of the matter.

Where is the theatre director Bernhard Vetter? His houseboat was found abandoned by the dam of the town of Märkt, but there is no sign of the man himself. And this several days after a performance of ›Oedipus the King‹ in Basel caused a real stir – so much so that a high society lady knocked out two of the director's teeth with her garnet ring. The press are in a frenzy of speculation: could the director be lying at the bottom of the Rhine? Is this the bourgeoisie's revenge on this uncompromising man of the theatre? Peter Hunkeler, detective inspector from the Basel Criminal Investigation Department, has only six weeks left until he retires. But is he ready to leave the stage? With mixed feelings he steps into the theatre milieu of which he himself had been part as a young man. He comes across old acquaintances, each with a score to settle with the theatre director. And finds himself in the enigmatic twilight world of Basel's Rhine harbour, in that no man's land between Switzerland, Germany and France where quite other powers hold sway.