The hunt for diamonds belonging to the drugs mafia is keeping Inspector Hunkeler on tenterhooks. A Lebanese courier gets rid of his wares before the police can seize him. The diamonds are found by a canal worker, who is determined to keep his lucky find. But the courier will do anything to get them back. With this, his first case, Inspector Peter Hunkeler from Basel makes his literary debut.

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.

In his sixth case the Basel inspector Peter Hunkeler is confronted with a murder, which, at federal level, becomes a rather sensitive case that’s more suited for the historians than the police. A man’s corpse is found on NewYear’s Day in an allotment on the outskirts of Basel, on land that comes under French jurisdiction. The dead man had been shot, but was found hanging on a butcher’s hook from the roof of his garden shed – just like butchers hang the carcasses of dead animals. The Basel police are not allowed to investigate the scene of the crime – the French crime department in Alsatian Colmar are the ones in charge here. Before long the identity of the dead man is revealed. He was Swiss, living in Basel, but is it really Anton Flückiger? The clues lead to Alsace, and to the affluent Emmental in Berne, and then events from the last weeks of the Second World War suddenly come to light, the wounds of which have never healed in Alsace ...

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.