Munich Wolf

Rory Clements

LIBRARIES and bookshelves are littered with novels set amidst the drama of life in pre-war Berlin, but in the febrile atmosphere of the mid-1930s, it was Munich – Adolf Hitler’s spiritual home – where the real Nazi power-play was fast spreading its evil roots. Munich, capital of the southern German state of Bavaria, was the city where the Führer first fomented revolution in the beer halls, where the National Socialist party had their headquarters, and where he met his future wife, Eva Braun.

But it was also a playground for hundreds of upper-class young Britons who treated the city as ‘a rather nice finishing school’ where they could dance, ski, swim, learn to speak German, and enjoy – even if only fleetingly – adventures in love.

Chief among these wealthy hedonists was Unity Mitford – one of the famous English Mitford sisters – who became obsessed with Hitler, meeting him frequently over the space of four years, and leading to rumours that the Führer might marry her. And it is against this gaudy, fevered and menacing backdrop that master storyteller Rory Clements (pictured below) – twice winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger for his John Shakespeare books and Tom Wilde wartime spy thriller series – brings us his first utterly gripping standalone novel.

At the heart of the story is Detective Inspector Sebastian (Seb) Wolff, a tough but principled murder squad police officer who hates the Nazis and whose life and work is dangerously constrained by the dark shadow of Munich’s ‘political police’ – better known as the Gestapo – and the Nazi in Seb’s own home.

In Munich in 1935, the young, aristocratic Britons swimming in the lakes and drinking beer in the cellars don’t see – or choose to ignore – the brutal underbelly of the Nazi movement which considers the city to be its spiritual home and runs almost every aspect of its daily life with an iron fist.

But not every German is a Nazi and 35-year-old Seb Wolff, who saw brutal, frontline action in the First World War, is one of those walking a fine line between doing his job and falling foul of the party that he hates.

In the third year of the Third Reich, peace reigns and everyone would appear to be happy in ‘the utopia of Adolf’s golden dawn’ but there is disquiet in some quarters and not least for Wolff who, after a brush with one of Hitler’s henchmen, was whisked away and briefly held in

custody at Dachau concentration camp. And it’s not only at work that Wolff is hemmed in... at home, he is under constant scrutiny from his 17-year-old son Jurgen – an avid member of the Hitler Youth – who regards his father as a traitor for disliking the Führer.

When 20-year-old Rosie Palmer, a high-born English girl whose mother is a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, is murdered, Wolff – a fluent English speaker – is ordered to solve the crime without delay as it’s a ‘bad look’ for the Third Reich. To make matters worse, Rosie was a close friend of Unity Mitford and Hitler is taking a personal interest in the case.

Followed by the secret police, who have assigned one of their men, Sergeant Hans Winter, to the hunt, and under the threat of being denounced by Jurgen, Wolff knows the stakes have never been higher. And when he begins to suspect that the killer might be linked to the highest reaches of the Nazi hierarchy, Wolff fears his task is simply impossible... and that there’s a good chance he might become the killer’s next victim.

Clements has found a rich and endlessly fascinating terrain for this enthralling murder mystery which takes us on a dark and disturbing journey into the upper echelons of Munich society in the 1930s... a political powder keg where impoverished aristocrats, naïve English acolytes, and increasingly empowered Nazis, daily dance, dally and deceive their way to the disaster, death and destruction of the Second World War.

It’s a place where the infamous party vibe jostles with the rise of a corrupt and evil regime, and where Wolff – a deeply humane man who lived, fought and killed in an earlier war – must battle his own sense of guilt and find a way to solve a murder that is entangled in a web of secrets, danger, suspicion and disturbing discoveries.

Using the raw edge of authentic history, a compelling cast of exquisitely drawn characters that includes some of the period’s real names and faces, and harnessing the anger, fear and emotional turmoil that gripped the city, Clements brings us a breathtaking, suspense-filled whodunit which thrills and chills from first page to last. Packed with the author’s prodigious imaginative power, faultless research, and stunning empathy for this unique and riveting period of history, Munich Wolf is fact and fiction, history and mystery at its heart-thumping, page-turning best, and already destined to be one of 2024’s best historical crime novels.
(Zaffre, hardback, £16.99)