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.

- A book of comfort for times of loss. - Strikingly open and honest. - Hansjörg Schneider's last crime novel ›Hunkeler and the Eyes of Oedipus‹ was number 1 on the Swiss best-seller list. »When I wrote this book, I concentrated on authenticity rather than getting caught up with stylistic finesse. It is a diary of my grief. I could have chiseled a gravestone for Astrid. But as I am a writer, not a stonemason, this book is my gift for her instead.« When Hansjörg Schneider's wife Astrid died of cancer in 1997, they had lived together for more than thirty years. »The truth is that we loved each other from the very beginning, and for a lifetime.« After her death, Hansjörg Schneider kept a diary for one year. The result is a personal book about a great love and a moving document of grief.

Hansjörg Schneider retraces familiar paths around Basel: to Kannenfeld Park, to Petersplatz Square and back again. Alert to the impressions of the present, sensitive to the memories echoing with every step, open to literary and philosophical reflections. It is a joy to accompany this extraordinary writer.

»For me, there is only the enlightening clarity of language. Language sheds light on the world, on life, on death.«
Hansjörg Schneider

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 a Swiss village at the end of the 1930s, a boy is born with a gill-like wound on his neck. It hurts when it dries out, and has to be watered regularly. As a result, little Moses Binswanger spends more time in the surrounding streams and ponds than in his family home, with his loving but unhappy mother and his rough father, who finds his own son and his ›watermark‹ creepy. Moses also retreats to the water when he cannot bear being around people anymore; wherever he goes, he is met by a mixture of horror and fascination. Women especially are fascinated by his ›watermark‹. But love proves to be a dangerous whirlpool which may tear lovers down into deadly depths.

Hansjörg Schneider is a master of the short form. The Owl over the Rhine collates the most wonderful of his texts from the last 20 years: a homage to his chosen home of Basel appears alongside memories of his childhood in rural Aargau, together with observations of people and everyday scenes, texts about nature and jazz, about dialect as a secret language and the perils of technology, about actors, artists, the literati and his own writing.

One of Switzerland’s best known and most popular writers looks back – in love, in grief, in anger and tenderness.

»I am a child of the Aare river. It is the most beautiful river in Switzerland, unimposing but a charming sight.«

Hansjörg Schneider writes about the Aargau region, the Nothern Swiss landscape that made him who he is today. About the gentle hills and meadows and the bleak, authoritarian atmosphere of his childhood and youth in the post-war years. About his time as a student in Basel up to his start into a life dedicated to literature.
Where does a writer come from? Authentic, touching and not the slightest bit conciliatory, Hansjörg Schneider traces his journey through life.

Hansjörg Schneider kept a new diary over the last ten years. He made notes on his reading, on encounters and projects, recording the moments of happiness that came by day, and the nightmares that haunted him by night. In the clear, direct language so treasured by readers of his Hunkeler novels, Hansjörg Schneider looks back at his life, his childhood, his marriage, his successes and failures as a writer – movingly and with laconic humour. The diary of a writer who has preserved the ability to be amazed: about the road that he has travelled, about the beauty of nature and the shortcomings of humankind, about the new day, and about the night when he first dreamt of hippos.

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.