The Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus is an intriguing mystery. The story is set in Germany and begins with the brutal slaying of a 93 year old man who had survived the German concentration camps… or at least that’s what people thought about the victim. It turns out they were wrong when evidence turns up on autopsy that he had actually been a member of the SS. Shortly thereafter two others are slain the same way and prove to have the same sort of shadowed past. The detectives working the case have to follow down a myriad of confusing stories of the past and people out for their own self-interests as they work to solve the case.The book is one that switches narrative viewpoint. In fact it switches narrative viewpoint a lot. I initially found this very irritating because you’d have one page to get interested in someone and the narrator would abruptly change leaving you hanging for quite a while before you were back with the original voice. Though strained at the beginning this technique actually heightened the rather frenetic action as the book raced toward its conclusion and wound up working for me.
All in all this was a book I would recommend to readers who like mystery, suspense, and books with lots of unreliable characters.
