In the winter of 1922, Inspector Kajetan finds himself investigating the murder of a young girl on a remote Bavarian farm. Needless to say, it isn't as simple a case as it looks, and the three unemployed men arrested near the scene of the crime are curiously reluctant to confess. Surely Kajetan's superiors couldn't be implicated in a right-wing conspiracy to grab power in Munich? And that abandoned mine mentioned in passing in the opening pages surely can't be going to turn out to be in use as a secret arms cache...?

Well, yes, unfortunately this is about as predictable as a Weimar Krimi can be, and the thrilling underground episodes of the closing chapters are only missing Timmy the dog. Hültner has a long and distinguished career writing for film and TV, and it shows.

But, despite that, I liked the way he treats his main character: Kajetan isn't a rebel ahead of his time, he's a perfectly believable Bavarian policeman, who's grown up believing in the infallibility of the courts, the universal guilt of the poor, and the inestimable value of investigative techniques based on shouting a lot and hitting suspects where it doesn't show. It's only in the confused new post-war world that he's starting to question the morality of some of the things he and his colleagues are asked to do. ( )