The announcement on Crime Watch that this novel is the winner of the Scottish Crime Novel of the Year 2015 reminded me that Craig Russell is an author that I was taken with nearly a decade ago, but I have read only the first two in the Jan Fabel series, and none since I began this blog. I know I have some hard back copies of at least one or two novels on my shelves somewhere.

So this seemed an opportune moment to do some catching up with Jan Fabel.

What THE GHOSTS OF ALTONA did is convince me that I must read some of the novels I have missed in the intervening years. Jan Fabel has come a long way since the novel I read nearly ten years ago. Two years ago (in "novel time") he nearly died, and his near death experience (NDE) changed his whole approach to life. Not only is he now a member of the Club of the Living Dead, people who have experienced similar NDEs, he is participating in group research into what actually happens as people experience death.

There is a remarkable depth to this novel, a feeling of good research, as the reader meets others who have also had NDEs and reacted quite differently to Fabel. There is also an exploration of Fabel's leadership style, the way he feels as if he is a fatherly figure for his hand-picked colleagues in Hamburg's Murder Commission.

And this is a novel where cold case meets the present day. The discovery of Monika Krone's skeleton under the asphalt of a car park, a murder unsolved for fifteen years, seems to trigger a number of deaths, seemingly unrelated.

Excellent story telling.

I was however struck by plot similarities with a novel I completed last week, SILENT SCREAM by Angela Marsons: where the discovery of a skeleton in wasteland next to an orphanage triggers murders. But in reality the two novels take entirely different paths. THE GHOSTS OF ALTONA features a seasoned investigator, while in SILENT SCREAM we see a career just beginning. ( )