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- Herausgeber: Orenda Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Chastity Riley Reloaded
- Sprache: Englisch
In Hamburg's troubled Wilhelmsburg district, Prosecutor Chastity Riley investigates a brutal double murder amid corruption and gentrification. Battling personal demons and powerful foes, she fights to expose a city's dark secrets. Germany's Queen of Krimi returns with the caustically funny, breathtakingly dark next instalment in an addictive series… 'As much a character study as the story of a crime … like a flipbook, full of startling images and sudden movements, that will thrill cynics and romantics alike' Sunday Times 'For the first time in a long time, I found a book I simply couldn't put down – and I didn't want it to end. There really should be a word for the sadness you feel when you're nearing the end of a truly fantastic read. Sharks is that kind of book' Leye Adenle 'Taut, compulsive and laced with humour as dark as its setting, Sharks raises the bar again for one of my favourite series. Chastity Riley is the perfect anti-hero for our times, and Simone Buchholz is the real deal' Rod Reynolds `Such a revelation´ Laura Lippman **The Chastity Riley series WON the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger** ____ In Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg's so-called 'problem area', an American couple is found brutally murdered in a derelict house. Prosecutor Chastity Riley is assigned the case, and quickly finds herself waist-deep in a murky tangle of city planners, shady investors and vanishing officials. The gentrification machine is rolling on, and someone is sending a very clear message. As November fog settles over the city, Chastity is coughing up blood, her personal life is a slow-motion disaster, and her former colleague, Faller, won't stop interfering. But nothing's going to stop her from cutting through the lies – not even the sharks circling ever closer. Dark, caustic and piercing, Sharks is a searing investigation into greed, power, and the price of resistance in a city devouring itself, from one of Germany's finest, most original crime writers. _______ 'Richly entertaining, wickedly cutting, to the point and funny. The perfect example of a crime novel that is literally pacy and has something to say, because you know Buchholz cares about society and Hamburg, and it shows in her writing' Paul Burke, CrimeTime Praise for the Chastity Riley series: 'A dark treat … memorable modern noir, and a fascinating portrait of seedy life in Hamburg' Telegraph `Simone Buchholz can make you grin, gasp or gag at will' The Times 'Beautifully concise, with commendably sparse prose, dark humour and an appealing protagonist … uncompromising, provocative and righteously fierce' Guardian 'Beautifully written in cool, witty prose' N.J. Cooper, Literary Review `German-American Chastity Riley [is] snooty, churlish, sarcastic, sometimes drunk and always inappropriate. The whole series breaks the boundaries of typical crime novels´ Romy Hausmann `A distinctive voice, and a flawed but compelling protagonist … style and sass and St Pauli´ Will Carver `Ice-cool, effortlessly classy prose´ Observer `Reading Buchholz is like walking on firecrackers´ Graeme Macrae Burnet `Buchholz's work remains as persuasive as ever´ Financial Times `Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space … a palpable hit´ Independent `With brief, pacy chapters and fizzling dialogue, this almost feels like American procedural noir and not a translation´ Maxim Jakubowski `There is a fantastic pace to the story … a unique voice that delivers a stylish story´ NB Magazine `A real blast of adrenaline´ Big Issue
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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TEAM ORENDAii
iii
SHARKS
SIMONE BUCHHOLZ
TRANSLATED BY RACHEL WARD
v
vi
For Christopher Riley
vii
CONTENTS
SHARKS
x
PUSH THE SACK ASIDE AND WALK IN
This is no entry-level cough. Every few minutes, a dirty old farm dog comes crawling out of my lungs and barks so hard its chain rattles. I should be lying in bed, drinking tea. But instead, I’m standing around in a south-Hamburg suburb, looking at two old people’s mangled heads, and smoking. I hold my forearm over my mouth.
‘You’re not well,’ says Calabretta, taking my cigarette off me.
‘It’s about time you went to see the doctor about it,’ says Brückner, his voice as severe as a side-parting.
‘She won’t listen,’ says Schulle. ‘Which is just plain rude.’ He looks at me, grasps his voice box and makes old-man noises. ‘I’ve been struck down by the plague too.’
Yeah, yeah, I think, getting to the end of my cough. It tastes a bit like blood. Once the barking dog has let go of my voice again, I say: ‘You’re free to put in a 2complaint against me, boys. Can I have my cigarette back, please?’
‘No,’ says Calabretta. He walks into the room next door to speak to the new head of forensics. Hollerieth and his perpetual slipped disc have taken early retirement – hallelujah. The new bloke’s called Kessler. Talented kid, modern and laid back. If his haircut was a tad less ambitious, I’d have a lot of time for him.
Walt and Lorraine Tucker’s flat is a bit like coming home – it looks just as shit as Auntie Grace and Uncle Luke’s place in Bellehaven, North Carolina. The wooden floorboards are stained dark, and are topped by a chaotic series of deep-pile rugs in allegedly homey colours, such as rust red and mint green. The wallpaper is yellowing; it might once have been white, or then again, it might not. The ceiling is panelled with a grid of hazelnut-brown, wooden boxes. In the very centre of the room, directly in front of the gigantic plasma TV, there’s a massive sofa with massive flowers in every possible pastel shade, all over its upholstery. In the corner, to the right of the screen, there’s an old brown gun cupboard, its door open. The cupboard is lined with a Confederate flag.
‘Is that allowed?’ I ask.3
‘What?’ says Brückner, ‘The far-right memorabilia?’
‘Keeping your guns in such a dodgy cupboard,’ I say.
‘I’d ban both,’ he replies.
To the left of the TV, a tea trolley rattles with my colleagues’ footsteps. It looks like it’s had to serve the Tuckers harder stuff than tea – there are five heavy crystal decanters on it, all more half empty than half full. Cheap bourbon, I’m guessing.
The stench of blood is competing with the reek of alcohol, old dust and frying from the day before yesterday.
I walk once around the sofa, so that I can take a calm look at the Tuckers. From back here, all I can see is that the bullets to their heads left pretty serious exit wounds. Mincemeat, you might call it. The floor creaks beneath my feet.
‘Whoa,’ I say, as I clock the old folks’ battered faces, ‘wasn’t really any need to shoot them as well.’
‘Let alone with such a large calibre,’ says Schulle. ‘Overkill, if you ask me.’
I have to cough.
Schulle looks at me, shakes his head and follows 4his colleague Brückner, who has set off around the flat. Calabretta and forensics are standing around the desk in the study, looking at the ammo from the gun cupboard.
I stay with the dead couple a while longer. The wrecked faces, all the blood. Lorraine Tucker’s clothes – and, as far as I can tell, her hair – are reminiscent of Donna Reed’s redoubtable Miss Ellie phase. Everything looms, flouncy and puffed up. Her dress, or pinny or nightie, is apricot. Her slippers are white and plushy. And even dead, she looks like she’s about to jump up because she’s forgotten to offer us cookies.
Walt Tucker’s dead body looks aggressive, like he always wanted to give everyone and everything a beating, and like he’d pack quite a punch. His plaid shirt bulges over hefty fast-food-hips and a broad chest. He’s not wearing trousers but shorts. In November. Growing out of the shorts are fat, hairy legs. His wife had to look at that, day in, day out.
I’d probably have found the Tuckers pretty unpleasant, but there’s something touching about them too. They tug on my past, the buried corners of my memory, and something on the floor of my heart starts to rustle.5
‘Boss?’ Calabretta. I clear my throat and whirl round. ‘What are you doing there?’
I’m feeling, I think. And I ask myself, yet again, what on earth would have become of me if my dad hadn’t stayed in Germany with me. If we’d lived together in North Carolina. If I’d become an American, a Southerner. If I’d had a home, if there’d been more than just my name.
‘Nothing,’ I say, ‘nothing at all.’
I wait until everyone’s busy with something or other again. Then I vanish out to the stairs, without saying goodbye. The stairwell is lonely and sad. Some of the steps are so worn that I keep slipping and almost make my way down on my arse. It annoys me when buildings rot like this. When people just let houses go to rack and ruin. An old house has a soul. And buildings need to be cared for, so that people can live in them. Nobody has cared for this place for years. The Tuckers were the last tenants, and the empty ground-floor flat doesn’t even have a front door. There’s nothing but an empty sack nailed to the frame. I push the sack aside and walk in. There’s nobody here, but once it gets dark, there must be quite a crowd using it as a roof over their heads. In 6pretty much every corner of every room, there’s a ratty sleeping bag or an old blanket and a filthy mattress. Some of the windows are still there, but most aren’t, and there isn’t even a plastic bag or anything stuck in the gaps.
Calabretta said that it must have been one of these people here who found the Tuckers and gave the police the anonymous tip-off. He’s assuming that we won’t find any of them, and that they’ll never come back here again. That the homeless are now deprived of even this hint of a home.
I stand in one of the former rooms for a minute longer. There’s a picture on one of the walls. A windjammer in full sail against the shredded wallpaper.
Nobody cares. Nobody.
SURVIVE THE WINTER
The sky is shimmering in that particular dark, autumn blue that heralds the winter. It’s down to the clouds. They’re heftier than in the spring and summer, they have a different power. They’re weightier, speedier, and all that puts pressure on the sky, of course it does. And even if the sun happens to be about, it still has to lug the darkness around with it. The Hamburg November sky may be an obtrusive thing in a minor key, a sentimental, dramatic construct, yet it doesn’t take itself too seriously, so I try not to either. If it did, it would never survive the winter.
I walk to the Wilhelmsburg S-Bahn station and get a taxi from there. It’s important to note that if you’re already under the weather, you should never take public transport, least of all line S3, least of all south of the Elbe, because it would pretty much finish you off.
NOTHING IN THE WORLD
Being at home in the daytime is just not my thing. I’m not that good at being at home at the best of times. Let alone in the daytime. Let alone in bed. Just five minutes more and I’ll be genuinely ill. I call Calabretta.
‘I hope you’re lying down in bed and not moving,’ he says.
‘Yup,’ I say. ‘It’s hideous.’
‘Perfect,’ says Calabretta. ‘And leave off the fags. You’ll kill yourself, boss.’
‘It’s just bloody bronchitis,’ I say, coughing into the crook of my arm.
‘It’s halfway to pneumonia,’ he says.
Halfway to hell, I think, lighting a cigarette.
‘We’ve got the first results from pathology,’ he says. ‘The Tuckers were as good as dead before they were shot. Serious head injuries.’
‘Certainly looked that way,’ I say.9
‘Someone really wanted to be on the super-safe side,’ he says.
Super-safe side, where’s he got that from, who’s he hanging around with?
I put the cigarette down in the ashtray beside my bed.
‘Anything else?’
‘The crime must have been committed between nine and eleven p.m.,’ he says. ‘And we’ve got a bit of DNA. Skin particles under Walt Tucker’s fingernails that aren’t his. He evidently had time to fight back.’
‘Have you talked this over with the lovely pathologist herself?’ I ask.
‘Betty’s not speaking to me,’ he says.
‘Since when?’
‘Since about four weeks ago,’ he says. ‘I actually got her to go out with me. But then I screwed up. And now she’s pissed off.’
‘Screwed up how?’ I ask.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Just screwed up, you know.’
Pause.
Then: ‘Guess I’m out of practice.’
There’s nothing Calabretta wants more in the world than a wife and family, he’s let on about that 10often enough. And there’s nothing in the world that he’s further away from.
‘What do ballistics say?’ I ask in a pathetic attempt at taking his mind off things. I’m sorry I mentioned Betty. ‘That ancient revolver lying on the sofa next to the pair of them – was that the murder weapon?’
‘Yep,’ says Calabretta. ‘An old Smith & Wesson, from Walt Tucker’s collection. A .38 Special.’
‘The connoisseur’s choice,’ I say.
‘Always does some serious damage,’ he says.
‘Should we be drawing any conclusions from that?’
‘Well,’ says Calabretta, ‘if you’re going to shoot someone with their own gun, it would be more discreet to take it away afterwards. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone’s sending a message. Schulle and Brückner are picking the Tuckers’ background apart as we speak. And the first team meeting is tomorrow afternoon.’
I take the cigarette from the ashtray, drag on it one last time, then stub it out.
‘You’re welcome to come along if you like.’
Of course I like.
‘Why did you disappear so suddenly earlier on?’
I hang up because I have to cough.
BALKAN FAIRY TALE
The music is sad but has a twinkle in its eye, and it shoots straight into every fibre of my being. I don’t know the tune, but it’s like I’ve been hearing it all my life – twisted Balkan music that sounds a bit like the essence of everything. The original idea. As if it was intended like this, exactly like this, no different, and by everything, I mean absolutely everything.
I walk over to the window, open it and look down into the street, and there they are – two dubious characters, one with a trumpet at his lips, and the other with an accordion between his hands. They’re rolling down our road, I think they’re tipsy if not totally plastered. They stagger to the end of the street, the music quietens but only slowly. Before they turn left, they wait, stop playing for a moment and shout something out into the dusk. I don’t know the language, of course, but then I don’t think they’re expecting me to answer.12
Then they start playing again, a different song, and it sounds just as familiar as the last one. When I was a student in Frankfurt, there was an old woman living in our building who listened to music a bit like this, and in her colourful clothes and floral headscarves and all her dark-gold jewellery, she looked like she’d stepped out of a Balkan fairy tale. I only had to catch sight of her from a distance and I’d have a lump in my throat. I never got a handle on what that was all about.
The men are long out of sight, but their melodies are still clinging to our road. To the walls, the windows, my brain. If I danced, I’d dance now.
Instead, I have the coughing fit from hell.
THE JACKPOT
Klatsche is standing in my doorframe, and he lays his hand on my brow.
‘You’ve got a temperature.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘don’t be silly.’
‘You look awful.’
‘Thanks, most kind of you.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘That’s OK. Come in, you reprobate.’
‘That’s reformed reprobate to you. And I’ll thank you to remember it.’
He strides into my hallway, turns into the bedroom, hurls himself on the bed and says, ‘Come here, baby, you really need to lie down.’
I don’t have the strength to explain to him that he shouldn’t call me ‘baby’, I don’t have the strength for anything, I’m the easiest victim you can imagine for a fit young guy in his mid-twenties, so I let myself drop onto the bed and wait to see what will happen 14next. Klatsche probably wants to fool around for a bit, I can see it in his face, in his shining eyes, in the taut twist to his lips. He lies beside me, leaning on his right elbow, and stares straight at me. OK, maybe he doesn’t want to fool around, maybe he wants to be annoying.
‘What,’ I say.
‘Baby, I might be moving on,’ he says.
‘What d’you mean, moving on?’ I ask. ‘Am I too old for you?’
‘Don’t talk crap.’ He kisses me on the forehead, rolls onto his back, lights a cigarette and says, ‘I’m thinking about getting into hospitality.’
I raise an eyebrow and say, ‘Pft.’
‘Not good?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Whereabouts exactly are you thinking of getting into it?’
‘Listen,’ he says, leaning up on his elbow again, ‘Ali’s retiring.’
‘Ali who?’
‘Big Turkish Ali, from the Blue Night,’ he says, ‘you know, the owner, the guy who was hiding little Heiner Matzen that time, remember?’
I nod. I remember it all too well. And I also know 15that Ali is in more than just hospitality. Ali is up to his neck in pretty much everything in the Kiez.
‘So,’ Klatsche says, ‘Ali asked Rocco and me if we wanted to take the place over.’ He sits up and pulls a serious face. ‘I mean, the big man asking small-time guys like us if we’d like to take on his legacy. That’s the jackpot!’
The absolute jackpot. Klatsche the ex-burglar king and Rocco, the mate he met in jail, opening a pub in the red-light district together.
‘So, what d’you think!’
‘The absolute jackpot,’ I say, and can’t help coughing.
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘quite the compliment from Ali, right? You can’t turn down an offer like that. Are you planning to ever stop coughing, by the way?’
I shake my head and cough some more.
When it’s quiet again, he strokes my hair and asks, ‘So? Anything up? Got any news? Apart from your consumption, I mean.’
‘An elderly couple, dead in the south of town,’ I say.
‘Mine’s more exciting then, right?’
I really like the lad, but sometimes, I could kick his arse.
A BAD-ORIGAMI PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
The taxi driver drops me off at Wilhelmsburg station again. The south of Hamburg is a shadowy neck of the woods. Supposedly, the next big thing, the hot shit, the leap across the Elbe; Wilhelmsburg, the new Mitte; Hamburg, a city on the rise.
I call bullshit, seriously.
Any time I come here, I don’t see any of that. All I see is a muddle of ghetto and nature, I see rundown tower blocks, gloomy pubs, grey streets. And growing right next to them are birch trees and willows and rose bushes; sometimes, there’s a little canal or a meadow. There are even old farms, a bit further from the S-Bahn tracks. I get the idea: things could be really nice here. But it doesn’t work. The problem is, this part of town has problems, and its emotional core is dreariness. There’s no new dawn in the air, there’s a rot, a lack of prospects. Abandon hope all ye who enter here – flee while you have the 17chance. And the only people who come here are those who can’t afford anything else, or not anymore. People don’t look like they’re here of their own free will.
Obviously, you can still try to market this kind of thing as an up-and-coming new suburb, someone’s going to make money that way.
