I was lucky to win a set of the books published so far in the Chastity Riley series – thanks to lovely Jen on Twitter.
This series is published by the fab people at Orenda Books and is bestselling in its native country, Germany.
Given all the excellent things I’d heard about this series, plus the fact that all four gorgeous novels had just arrived in the post, I thought I’d give it a go. Obviously, Book 1 was my starting point, so in I went with ‘Blue Night’.
One of the hugely appealing things about the series is that it is set in Hamburg, a place I visited a few years ago. Buchholz’s Hamburg is a seedy and corrupt place, filled with drug dealers, gangsters and prostitutes in the famous Reeperbahn district. I’d like to point out that this is a way away from the Hamburg my family experienced – the Miniatur Wunderland with its huge model railway was more our thing – but it was nice to be able to picture some of the settings and buildings mentioned in the novel.
The story centres on a mysterious man in hospital after a brutal attack. Chastity Riley, our heroine and a state prosecutor, is assigned to his case and immediately senses that there is something worth following up. Initially the man is uncooperative, but Chastity soon wins him over with her contraband alcohol and tobacco smuggled into the hospital. This puts her on the trail of a huge case involving synthetic drugs and one of Hamburg’s criminal overlords…
Hopefully, everything I’ve written so far has given the impression that this is a dark book! It is similar in style to some of the Nordic Noir books that I’ve read – a kind of Hamburg Noir packed with sweary and straight-talking people, drugs and heavy drinking, gritty storylines and a shadowy criminal underworld.
As much as I love Nordic Noir, I was so pleased to find that this book was considerably funnier than some of its Scandinavian counterparts. Chastity is a fabulous narrator with a dry sense of humour and a lively turn of phrase – I’m not sure whether to credit Buchholz herself for this or some nifty translation work by Rachel Ward. All of Chastity’s first-person narration is written in her distinctive, sweary, colloquial voice – and it works brilliantly. It’s like being told a story by a really indiscreet, funny, brutally honest friend.
I did find it harder to get my head around some of the other characters in the book – I think they will come into their own later in the series perhaps. In particular, I loved cafe owners Carla and Rocco – Chastity’s friends – and wanted to see more of them as being slightly more of the ‘normal’ world outside the crime and law enforcement community.
Although most of the book is told by Chastity, there are sections that form flashbacks in multiple voices involved with the story. At the start, it isn’t obvious who some of them are but it becomes clearer – a really clever device that filled in gaps in Chastity’s narrative, dropped clues and gave some back-story.
Overall, I found this an engaging and lively series opener – I will definitely carry on and read the rest. I loved the narrative voice, even though the story was grittier than my usual choice of books, and I’d recommend that everyone take a peek into Chastity’s Hamburg underworld.
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