Book review: Stasi Wolf – Karin Muller returns to solve another perplexing case in East Germany

I came across David Young’s first novel Stasi Child in 2015 and was immediately captivated by the idea of crime in East Germany, particularly the scenario of the first novel.  I’ve waited eagerly for the follow up and it’s out at last.

So, what’s it about?  Stasi Wolf begins with Oberleutnant Karin Muller sidelined from her job as head of the Murder Squad, instead dealing with low level, petty misdemeanours by disrespectful pseudo hippies.  Muller receives an offer for a transfer to Halle Neustadt, a model East German city where twin babies have been abducted.  She accepts because even as an Oberleutnant, she will outrank the local uniformed police to head up the murder enquiry.

Although she energises the local police team, the city’s Stasi officers constantly place restrictions on the investigation that appear almost designed to make their work ineffective – no public campaign, no searches, and most importantly, no contact at all with any of the people on “this list”.  The investigating team always feel the influence of the Stasi through Major Malkus and Hauptman Jankowitz, who constantly set boundaries on the investigation and affirm this with warnings of the consequences of disobedience.

There is also a sub plot of Muller’s relationship with her family, her memories of a difficult childhood and the feeling that she never had the same depth of warmth and love from her parents that she saw her siblings receive. And finally, some love interest too – Doctor Emil Wollenburg has also been transferred to Halle Neustadt, although I’m sure other readers will wonder whether he is a covert Stasi agent sent to keep an eye on Karin.

So, what did I think?  Well, as soon as I heard of Stasi Wolf I was on the internet to find out more about Halle Neustadt and I found lots of interesting articles as well as some fascinating film clips on YouTube.  So, once I started reading the novel, it was almost like a familiar place and I could visualise the huge apartment blocks and the layout of the city, which was driven by quite progressive planning principles such as easy and close access to parks, open space and public transport.  Surprisingly, there were no street names, only numbers, which sounds like an interesting idea, but in practice was plain bonkers, especially with the uniformity of the buildings and inconsistency of the numbering system.   

Halle Neustadt was a young people’s city and there are scenes in the book of happy everyday life such as mothers out with children in a genuinely social environment that makes the city quite an attractive place.  Despite this, there’s a practical downside – the scarcity of everyday consumer goods, the appalling levels of pollution from nearby chemical factories and the pervasive presence of the Stasi in nearly all aspects of everyday life.  Karin is under surveillance, literally from the moment she arrives in the city, when her car is followed by a black Skoda.  There’s also that constant guessing about who could be a Stasi informant – this sounds like its paranoia, but by 1989 the Stasi its estimated there were up to 2,000,000 Stasi collaborators and that the Stasi maintained files on approximately 6,000,000 East German citizens—more than one-third of the population.  At one point in the story, a Stasi officer tells Muller that a comment she made as a young girl over 20 years ago, is noted on her file – typifying the level of surveillance and monitoring that East German citizens endured.  However, one of the best things about the novel is that it’s not a polemic about how bad East German life was – the narrative just gives you the facts about daily life, “warts and all”, expertly woven into the fabric of a good crime story.

Final verdict – Great concept, great writing, great story.  Buy the book! 

Romancrimeblogger