Evil in High Places

Rory Clements

WHEN a famous actress disappears from a Munich film set in the days before the opening of the 1936 Winter Olympics, the city’s captain of police is under pressure to find her fast.

But the stakes are dangerously high for Detective Sebastian Wolff, not just because Chancellor Adolf Hitler wants no hint of any crime with the world’s press watching like hawks… but because the missing star happens to be the mistress of leading Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels.

Novels and thrillers set amidst the drama of life in pre-war Berlin have long been a source of fascination but in the febrile atmosphere of the mid-1930s, it was Munich – 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, where he met his future wife Eva Braun, and where Hitler staked the reputation of his Nazi regime on the success of the snow-filled Winter Olympics at Garmish-Partenkirchen. Capturing all the menace, brutality and fevered hedonism of this pre-war period in Munich is 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 – and now author of an outstanding historical series which began last year with the gripping opener, Munich Wolf.

At the heart of Evil in High Places, Clements’ second atmospheric page-turner, we meet up again with Sebastian (Seb) Wolff, a tough but principled murder squad police chief 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 his son Jurgen, the Hitler Youth Nazi who lives in Seb’s own home.

In February of 1936, Munich is gearing up for the Winter Olympics in the Bavarian Alps and what the Nazis plan will be a spectacular showcase for their authoritarian regime. But as the athletes prepare to fight for gold and the Nazis fight for power, Captain of Detectives Seb faces a battle of his own.

At first, he can’t understand what all the fuss is about when a German film star called Elena Lang – who is currently starring in a movie called Evil in High Places being produced by a British crew in Munich – goes missing from the film set. Knowing her reputation, Seb is convinced she’s probably overslept ‘in someone else’s room’ but Elena Lang is no ordinary film-star… she is also the mistress of Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand-propagandist, and the order is that she must be found without any delay. Hitler has decreed that nothing must detract from the Games and that means ‘no murders, no missing people, no scandals.’

But corruption runs deep in Munich and Elena is just the first to go missing. Along with his sidekick, Sergeant Hans Winter of the Bavarian Political Police, who works under the pressure of being outed for his recently discovered Jewish ancestry, Seb begins a search that will take them the from the highest and wealthiest echelons of society to the city’s darkest corners.

As a non-Nazi in a city full of Nazis, Seb has to ‘go along with their games, treat arrogance as a social disorder and get on with his job as best he could’ but he soon learns how easily the hunter becomes the hunted and just how fine the line is between justice and jeopardy. This is a city and a country on the brink of war, and some enemies are better left alone because the closer you get, the further you have to fall…

Clements has found a rich and endlessly fascinating terrain for these enthralling murder mysteries which take readers on a dark and disturbing journey into Munich society in the 1930s... a political powder keg where decadent aristocrats, naïve English acolytes, and increasingly empowered Nazis carve out a path towards the death and destruction of the Second World War. It’s a place where the infamous party vibe jostles with the sinister cruelties 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 perilous high stakes case while the eyes of the world – and the Nazis – are watching.

Using the raw edge of wartime history, a compelling cast of brilliantly drawn characters which includes real names like Hitler-obsessed rich girl Unity Mitford and British skier Peter Lunn – who famously refused to march in front of the Führer at the Olympics opening ceremony – and harnessing the city’s anger and fear, and the Nazis’ increasingly violent persecution of the Jews, Clements brings us a breathtaking, fast-paced and suspense-filled whodunit which thrills and chills from first page to last.

Packed with the author’s prodigious imaginative power, extensive research, and stunning empathy for this unique and riveting period of history, Evil in High Places is fact and fiction, history and mystery at its heart-thumping, page-turning best, and packed with all the electrifying authenticity that has become the hallmark of Clements’ work.
(Viking, hardback, £16.99)