The Wolf Children

Book Two of the Inspector Frank Stave Investigations, a German detective trilogy set in post-WWII Hamburg. More than 150,000 copies sold.

Hamburg, 1948

It is a year of extremes. After a bitterly cold winter of starvation, the bombed city groans under excruciating heat. And Chief Inspector Frank Stave is confronted with a new case.

In the ruins of a shipyard, the corpse of a boy is found and Stave's hunt for the killer leads him into the world of "wolf children" - orphaned children who have fled from the Occupied Eastern Territories and are now united in gangs.

When two more bodies are discovered Stave is under even increasing pressure as he struggles to keep his personal life together too . . .

Praise for the Frank Stave Investigations

'Undoubtedly the most powerful work of crime fiction I have read this year' Independent

'Vivid and harrowing' Sunday Times

'Police procedural, romance, thriller The Murderer in Ruins has a bit of everything and it's one hell of a read.' Bucher

Reader reviews for The Wolf Children

'This is writing at its best. A well crafted murder hunt set in haunting landscape of post war Hamburg. Cay Rademacher has again written a book that will stay in my memory for a long time'

'Another atmospheric, well-researched novel from Rademacher. He has a remarkable ability to bring characters to life in the space of a paragraph'

'A bit of a goldilocks book. Not too heavy, not too light, not too long, not too short. Just about right' *****

Translated from the German by Peter Millar

“With his follow up to The Rubble Murderer, Rademacher has once again captured an intriguing view into a not so distant world in which everyone is fighting for survival.”

'Undoubtedly the most powerful work of crime fiction I have read this year' Independent; 'Vivid and harrowing' Sunday Times

Cay Rademacher was born in 1965 and studied Anglo-American history, ancient history, and philosophy in Cologne and Washington. He has been an editor at Geo since 1999, and was instrumental in setting up renowned history magazine Geo-Epoche. The Murderer in Ruins is the first novel in the Inspector Stave series; The Wolf Murderer and The Forger have also been published by Arcadia Books. He now lives in France with his wife and children, where his new crime series is set.

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