Entre dos aguas - Rosa Ribas

Not all cases are as easily resolved as Mrs Merckele, who has been charged with the killing of her husband, even though both are elderly and not the kind of people you expect to be the subject of a murder investigation. After his death, a secret room was found in the office of Jörg Merckele who worked in the banking sector, an Aladdin's cave, filled with numerous purchases, from jewellery and CDs to gym equipment. His wife has murdered him, suspecting an affair because of the spending on his bank accounts, but she is unrepentant even when she finds out that he has been hoarding so much over the years.

That case is quickly wrapped up and the paperwork done rather in a rush, because there is another more troubling case for Commissioner Cornelia Weber and her homicide team. The weather has been bad in Frankfurt, causing flooding and bringing the city traffic to a standstill, and the Main river has thrown up a dead body, wrapped around one of the pillars of the Alte Brücke bridge. The body is soon identified with the help of police officer Leopold 'Leoncito' Müller as Marcelino Soto, the owner of a couple of Spanish restaurants in Frankfurt. Müller speaks Spanish and works on border control, but is keen to work with Weber on the murder case.

Although she doesn't know the victim, the case has particular significance for Cornelia Weber, as the German police commissioner is half-Spanish, her mother originally from Galicia. There is actually a substantial Spanish community in Frankfurt, but Cornelia Weber-Tejedor, in her early 40s, has been born there and has little dealing with the close-knit generation of immigrants that arrived in the city fleeing from the Franco regime. There is a suspicion indeed that there might be a related political element to the killing, as Soto originally left Spain on a tourist visa and never returned, fearing persecution for his socialist activities. Those days are long past, but there are associations there that have to be looked into, and they aren't ones that Weber wants to be connected with herself, despite her family heritage.

Entre dos aguas, the first Commissioner Cornelia Weber case, is not all out murder and action, the book settling quickly into a rhythm of investigation, character development and exploration of tensions and the nature of crime in the city. There is another seeming minor case thrown in that seems to be a distraction from the main murder investigation, where Weber tasked with looking for a missing South American woman who had been working as a housemaid. With no suggestion of homicide, it's not Weber's usual area, but it's carried out at the behest of a superior officer, since the woman was in the country illegally and working for influential people in the banking sector. 

What both cases bring up however is evidently an exploration of the mix of the Spanish and Spanish speaking community, as well as other foreign immigrants and their integration or otherwise into the German community in Frankfurt. Differences that are as much cultural as behavioural also comes up of course in the personal relationship between Weber and her superiors and colleagues, not least sub commissioner Reiner Fischer, the normally Germanically precise and meticulous officer she has worked with for years who has been behaving strangely lately with unexplained absences.

I wasn't sure that starting a crime series set in Frankfurt was the best way of looking to explore some Spanish-language crime fiction, even if the detective is half-Spanish, but the sample I downloaded from Amazon was promising. Entre dos aguas is definitely more Spanish than German, using the German setting as a way of exploring certain Spanish qualities, behaviours and cultural differences, but it also takes in much more than that, contrasting generations of immigration and the impact it has on crime. It may be relatively slow moving in its process of information gathering, but with such a cultural mix and contrast it is never dull and certainly establishes a unique kind of investigation team with specific modern challenges in a diverse and rapidly changing European city.

Entre dos aguas by Rosa Ribas (Rosa Ribas Moliné), the first in a series of books based on the half-Spanish half-German police commissioner, Cornelia Weber-Tejedor, was originally published in 2007. I read Entre dos aguas as part of a Kindle edition published by Debolsillo that collects the first three books - Entre dos aguas, Con anuncio and En caída libre. I'll definitely be reading the others.