The Ice Queen

The Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus

Summary: The body of 92-year-old Jossi Goldberg, Holocaust survivor and American citizen, is found shot to death execution style in his house near Frankfurt. A five-digit number is scrawled in blood at the murder scene. The autopsy reveals an old and unsuccessfully covered tattoo on the corpse's arm—a blood type marker once used by Hitler's SS. Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver Bodenstein are faced with a riddle. Was the old man not Jewish after all? Who was he, really? Two more, similar murders happen—one of a wheelchair-bound old lady in a nursing home, and one of a man with a cellar filled with Nazi paraphernalia—and slowly the connections between the victims becomes evident: All of them were lifelong friends with Vera von Kaltensee, baroness, well-respected philanthropist, and head of an old, rich family that she rules with an iron fist. Pia and Oliver follow the trail, which leads them all the way back to the end of World War II and the area of Poland that then belonged to East Prussia. No one is who they claim to be, and things only begin to make sense when the two investigators realize what the bloody number stands for, and uncover an old diary and an eyewitness who is finally willing to come forward.  Nele Neuhaus's The Ice Queen is a character- and plot-driven mystery about revenge, power, and long-forgotten and covered up secrets from a time in German history that still affects the present. Angie's Comments: This plot is very twisting and convoluted. Sometimes there was a lot going on, but I was able to keep track of most of it (I hope!). When the book summary says “No one is who they claim to be”, it really sums up the characters. The details kept me guessing until the very end. I enjoyed reading this book, as everything kept changing. The one issue I had with this plot is that it would have been really easy to destroy most of the evidence, so why didn’t the criminals do that? The author says it is due to arrogance, but I can’t buy that. Otherwise, fantastic mystery.     Request this item