The Murder Investigation of Adolf Hitler: The Munich Mysteries
Less than a month after he joins the Munich Homicide Division, Avi Kreisler is called to investigate the death of a young woman, her body found crushed against the curbstone in front of her apartment building. An apparent suicide, Kreisler’s superior insists. But the crime scene raises suspicions that the woman was a blackmailer. Although the apartment was carefully ransacked, a letter remained hidden, taped inside a window shade. It’s an intimate message from Adolf Hitler to his niece, Angela (Geli) Raubal.
When Geli is found dead from a gunshot wound days later, Avi is reluctant to believe what his superiors and members of the National Socialist Party insist—that Geli killed or accidentally shot herself after an argument with Hitler the day before—and follows the facts himself.
The Murder Investigation of Adolf Hitler is based on actual events: Geli’s death, questions about Hitler’s possessive relationship with the girl, and the short-shrift investigation—no inquest or autopsy. The novel rises above a police procedural, placing the murder investigation in historical context: the early days of Nazism, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the vociferous opposition from some Nazi and other political party leaders as well as the Communist press.
It does stumble, however, in the step-by-step detective story sense. Instead of leading the reader along, the storyline jumps ahead with unexpected lines of investigation. Instead of teasing out bits of information from witnesses, dialogue repeats already known facts. Pages nevertheless turn in the rush to find out what happened and just who did what to whom.
