Blue Night (1) (Chastity Riley)

Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley has been side-lined to prevent her from causing trouble, but her new job turns out to be far from dull when she finds herself involved in taking down an Albanian mafia kingpin. First in an addictive, wildly original series from the Queen of Krimi…

‘Stripped back in style and deadpan in voice, Blue Night is a scintillating romp around the German criminal underworld and back’ Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

‘By turns lyrical and pithy, this adventure set in the melting pot of contemporary Hamburg has a plot and a sensibility that both owe something to mind-altering substances. Lots of fun’ Sunday Times

***WINNER of the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger 2022***

***WINNER of the German Crime Book of the Year Award***

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The career of Hamburg’s most hard-bitten state prosecutor, Chastity Riley, has taken a nose dive: she has been transferred to the tedium of witness protection to prevent her making any more trouble. However, when she is assigned to the case of an anonymous man lying under police guard in hospital, Chastity’s instinct for the big, exciting case kicks in.

Using all her powers of persuasion, she soon gains her charge’s confidence, and finds herself on the trail to trouble…

Fresh, fiendishly fast-paced and full of devious twists and all the hard-boiled poetry and acerbic wit of the best noir, Blue Night marks the stunning start of a brilliant new crime series, from one of Germany’s bestselling authors.

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‘Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space. Blue Night is a palpable hit’ Independent

‘Disgraced state prosecutor Chastity Riley chases round the dive bars of the port city pursuing and being pursued by a beguiling cast of cops, criminals and chums, delivering scalding one-liners as she goes’ The Times

‘Blue Night has great sparkling energy, humour and stylistic verve … and the story itself is gripping and pacey’ Rosie Goldsmith, European Literature Network

‘A must-read, stylish and highly original take on the detective novel, written with great skill and popping with great characters’ Judith O’Reilly, author of Killing State

‘Constantly surprising, Blue Night is an original, firecracker of a read’ LoveReading

‘If Philip Marlowe and Bernie Gunther had a literary love child, it might just explain Chastity Riley – Simone Buchholz’s tough, acerbic, utterly engaging central character’ William Ryan

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the Krimi ZEIT Best of Crime List for months. The critically acclaimed Beton Rouge, Mexico Street, Hotel Cartagena and River Clyde all followed in the Chastity Riley series. Hotel Cartagena won the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger in 2022. The Acapulco (2023) marked the beginning of the Chastity Reloaded series, with The Kitchen out in 2024. She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.

Rachel Ward is a freelance translator of literary and creative texts from German and French to English. Having always been an avid reader and enjoyed word games and puzzles, she discovered a flair for languages at school and went on to study modern languages at the University of East Anglia. She spent the third year working as a language assistant at two grammar schools in Saaebrücken, Germany. During her final year, she realised that she wanted to put these skills and passions to use professionally and applied for UEA’s MA in Literary Translation, which she completed in 2002. Her published translations include Traitor by Gudrun Pausewang and Red Rage by Brigitte Blobel, and she is a Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
 

Follow Rachel on Twitter @FwdTranslations, on her blog www.adiscounttickettoeverywhere.wordpress.com and on her website www.forwardtranslations.co.uk