En caída libre - Rosa Ribas

In a manner that is becoming familiar with the series involving half-Spanish half-German Frankfurt police Commissioner Cornelia Weber, En caída libre (In Free Fall) opens with two apparently unrelated cases, a Spanish connection and new complications in the Commissioner's personal life. The prologue presents the situation of an airline cleaning lady Fatima Celik, dying after a fall down the stairway of a plane that has just arrived from Santiago, Chile. Although accidental there is a suspicion that drugs were hastily removed from her pocket by a colleague just after the fall. Cornelia's involvement with this case arises out of another death. As with the first book in the series, Entre dos aguas, it arises out of the Main river in the form of the dead dismembered body of a young woman, Nicole Eulenberg, weighted down with stones and washed up on the shore at Niederrad.

There is a Spanish or Spanish language connection in both cases, suspicion being thrown on a flight from Chile in the first, while in the case of Nicole Eulenberg, although her family had thought she was on a trip to America, it is discovered that she was actually in Colombia. Despite all appearances of being a model Business Science student and daughter, a post mortem discovers that she died of an overdose from a burst latex bag of cocaine that she had ingested. Both cases appear to be connected to drugs gangs, to the smuggling of drugs through the airport.

Cornelia has her own personal problems to deal with. Her father's declining mental health is a worry for her mother and her brother. Cornelia's failing marriage to Jan has also reached a turning point after her sleeping with a police colleague Leopold in the last novel, Con anuncio. The traffic of drugs a problem in Frankfurt, centre where it is spread throughout Germany. There is the suspicion that the cleaning ladies at the airport in Frankfurt are involved, or being manipulated by a higher organisation. Gang criminality and narcotics aren't usually in the line of Commissioner Weber's homicide investigation, but the police need someone inside, and since Cornelia’s on-off diversion with Leo is currently ‘off’, Cornelia volunteers to take up a job as a cleaning lady. 

The decision is taken mainly for such personal reasons. Needing a little space to step back and reflect on the direction her life has taken (en caída libre?), Cornelia finds that the opportunity to become someone else might be good for her. It's not the most glamorous undercover operation, but that's the nature of Rosa Ribas’ Cornelia Tejedor-Weber thrillers. It's not exactly cosy crime - the threat from the criminals in the drugs ring is very real, very present and very dangerous, so there is no way Cornelia can drop her guard and risk being exposed - but the emphasis or balance does lean more towards the personal side of things than really exploring the nature of international drugs gangs.

By coincidence I read Berta Isla by Javier Marías alongside this and while he also takes the unconventional and less glamorous route it goes without saying that even if lacking specifics on the operations of his dual nature mixed parentage spy Tomás Nevinson, Marías is nonetheless far more in-depth about the nature of the impact of undercover infiltration. Cornelia Weber has her own unique difficulties and circumstances, since her own everyday life is in a state of change, her future unknown. Her undercover operation therefore becomes in many ways an alternative life that she starts to adapt to, and it's not without bringing its own set of problems. Whether that has any lasting impact on the direction her life takes remains to be seen.

En caída libre takes in other themes that are familiar in this series (aside from another minor case here that really doesn't have much relevance and is of limited interest), opening up to take in the circumstances of others who struggle to adapt in Frankfurt, in German society. Many of the cleaning ladies are immigrants all seeking to make a living, and there are few other options for them to earn that much needed extra money than getting involved in criminal networks. Cornelia strikes up genuine friendships but worries about them ultimately being fake because of her assumed identity. These kinds of considerations do push the series further into cosy crime territory - and there is a worrying lack of focus at times - but it keeps one foot in the real world and as such tends to avoid the usual police thriller cliches, which only arise self-consciously in the discussion of cop TV dramas. En caída libre is not the best entry in the series, but this is still a refreshingly different series with plenty of potential.

Reading notes: En caída libre by Rosa Ribas is the third book in Cornelia Weber-Tejedor series. None of the books are available in English translation. The first three books in the series - Entre dos aguas, Con anuncio and En caída libre are collected in a single Spanish language paperback. I read the Kindle edition of this collection published by Debolsillo.