My Books
In the course of only a few days, various women die in Lisbon. Cause of death: a single stab to the chest, conducted with extreme precision. The only thing all these death cases seem to have in common: all of these women had immediately before their death been asked for the time by their killer. Chief Superintendent Carina Andreia da Cunha and her team are facing a mystery - and are getting under time pressure as the murders continue.
When Carina, with the help of her colleague Bruno, makes the acquaintance of the German Christian Brandtstetter, they seem to make some progress. With the help of Christian, Carina is whisked into a world completely alien to her. However, it looks like the German also has the one or other thing to hide ...
An Italian tourist is murdered in a particularly cruel manner in his room at a Lisbon hotel. There are no usable traces, but everything points to a female killer with whom the victim, shortly before his death, still had sex. Other than that, it only appears that the motive for the murder is a very personal one.
While Chief Superindent Carina Andreia da Cunha and her team are still trying to reconstruct the last hours of the victim, the next murder happens, following exactly the same pattern. But this time, Carina receives help, even if this is coming unexpectedly and in a way that does not only affect her professional life. A first clue finally guides her to the „Museu Nacional de Arqueologia de Lisboa“, where nothing appears to be as it seems at first sight ...
On a somewhat remote parking lot, the body of a heavily tortured man is discovered. The mutilations are so severe that at first even a forensic identification is impossible.
At the same time, Carla, IT specialist and the youngest member of the team of Chief Superintendent Carina Andreia da Cunha, is stalked in an online computer game by another gamer. When the stalker begins to leave his secure digital environment, the team gets going, if for the time being only unofficially.
When sometime later another corpse is found at the same parking lot, the case takes an unexpected turn. Carina and her team find themselves in a world where nothing is like it seems - and they pay a high price ... ​
In a locked room, five people are struggling to escape their seemingly inevitable death. At the same time, in a different place, a man is shot to death with a large caliber gun. His body is discovered near the luxury marina of Belém a few days later. And that is not the end yet ...
For the past three months after joining the team of Chief Superintendent Carina Andreia da Cunha, Kendra Chakussanga had felt - to put it mildly - unchallenged. Now she is in the middle of a case that could hardly be any weirder and is getting even more bizarre every day. As if this was not enough, some of the people around her start to behave strangely as well, even one of whom she would have expected it the least. And then there is also her colleague Bruno ...
An obviously heavily drunk man with apparently no sense of direction staggers across a lively square in the city centre of Lisbon. Before the police can intervene the man breaks down and dies sometime later under mysterious circumstances in the hospital. A few days later a young woman passes out in her gym, is thrown off the treadmill and dies as well. And she is not the last victim ...
When Chief Superintendent Carina Andreia da Cunha and her team discover the first leads, they realise that without external help they won't get anyway further in this case. With the support of a subject matter expert assigned to their team, they enter a world that is characterized by suffering and sacrifice but also hope. A case that does not even stop before their private lives.
After the murder of a Norwegian specialist for medical devices, the investigation is on. Chief Superintendent Carina Andrea da Cunha and her team believe that the murderer can be found among the accomplices of the Norwegian after he had dropped out of a large-scale illegal deal with high-end technology for diabetics, and had offered himself as a witness to the investigating authorities, prepared to hand over data, names, and numbers.
Investigations are going slow due to the international list of suspects. Then another murder happens. The victim is a potential witness to the murder of the Norwegian, even though some things simply don't seem to add up. Carina, however, does not believe in coincidence, and as this appears to be the only lead they have, the team takes to drastic measures: Bruno goes undercover...
After Chief Commissioner Carina Andreia da Cunha, due to the success of her team's investigation especially for cases with international participation, was sent on a training course abroad, Bruno has provisionally taken over the leadership of the investigation team. But on the very first day, Carina's former superior Matilde Barros appears and announces that the team under her leadership has been assigned to the investigation of a case at the highest level.
A Russian criminal arrested in Portugal was to be extradited to the Russian authorities under a mutual assistance procedure. On the way to the airport the prisoner transport was attacked, several people were killed and the prisoner is on the run. Carina's team is starting the investigation, but it soon turns out that it is a case of several unknowns, where it is even difficult to know who is hunting whom...
After Chief Commissioner Carina Andreia da Cunha, due to the success of her team's investigation especially for cases with international participation, was sent on a training course abroad, Bruno has provisionally taken over the leadership of the investigation team. But on the very first day, Carina's former superior Matilde Barros appears and announces that the team under her leadership has been assigned to the investigation of a case at the highest level.
A Russian criminal arrested in Portugal was to be extradited to the Russian authorities under a mutual assistance procedure. On the way to the airport the prisoner transport was attacked, several people were killed and the prisoner is on the run. Carina's team is starting the investigation, but it soon turns out that it is a case of several unknowns, where it is even difficult to know who is hunting whom...
CRIME FICTION IN PORTUGAL ...?
One might get the impression that nowhere else people read as much as in Portugal. The trains, buses, and trams are full of people who read, and we are not even talking about eBooks, but actually bulky volumes. The genre of crime fiction, however, seems to eke out a sad life in the shadow in the country of frequent readers and great and famous authors - including one holding a Noble Prize for literature. There is not really a lot of authors who set the plot of their crime fiction novel in Portugal, and the majority of those who do are not even Portuguese authors. He or she who wants to read a good detective story depends on foreign authors, either in the original or as a translation. The problem here: Other than in the German, English or Nordic linguistic areas, there is no such thing as a 'hero detective' as the protagonist of a crime story. Not yet.
During the time of the dictatorship under António Salazar, and his successor Marcello Caetano the police had, in the overall perception of the population, played a rather inglorious role and their sheer presence had in general spread a feeling of fear rathern than one of security, a negative image that still lingers on in modern times and finds its expression in Portuguese people being rather reserved when it comes to direct contacts with the representatives of law enforcement, going as far as generating a feeling of anxiety even in harmless situations like a routine traffic check. Hardly the background for stories in which a police officer is depicted as a hero ...
„Santa Justa“ is the common name of one of the most distinctive landmarks of Lisbon, the „Elevador do Carmo“, designed by Raoul Mesnier de Ponsard, a scholar of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel.
