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When neatly packed male body parts wash up by the River Elbe, Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley and her colleagues begin a perplexing investigation.
As the murdered men are identified, it becomes clear that they all had a history of abuse towards women, leading Riley to wonder if it would actually be in society’s best interests to catch the killers.
But when her best friend Carla is attacked, and the police show little interest in tracking down the offenders, Chastity takes matters into her own hands. As a link between the two cases emerges, horrifying revelations threaten Chastity’s own moral compass, and put everything at risk…
It's such a pleasure to be hosting the blog tour for The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz today. Many thanks to Orenda Books and Anne Cater for inviting me and for sending me an advance copy of the novel.
I've always been a huge fan of Simone Buchholz's series about Hamburg State Prosecutor, Chastity Riley and am delighted that Orenda Books are publishing the earlier novels in the prequel Chastity Reloaded series. There is nobody who writes like Simone Buchholz and in The Kitchen she once again throws out the crime fiction rulebook.
At the start of the novel, Chas is preparing for the upcoming trial of three sex traffickers who targeted Romanian girls with promises of fantastic jobs as dancers, waitresses and au pairs but on arrival in Hamburg, they were relieved of their passports and made to work in backstreet brothels. The hell these young women were put through has obviously incensed her and their faces have been stalking her dreams for weeks. Although this case has been solved, Chas is still committed to achieving a fitting conviction but as the novel progresses, she is forced to examine her conscience and consider what justice truly means to her.
When the body parts of a man are found in a bin bag in the River Elbe, Chas has a new investigation on her hands but even after more men are found murdered, clearly by the same perpetrator, Chastity struggles to fully engage with the case. This isn't really a murder mystery, however, and the gripping storyline presents readers with enough hints and clues to figure out both the perpetrator and their motive. Simone Buchholz is more concerned with considering the personal cost of crime and although her writing is frequently caustically witty, The Kitchen is a sharply penetrative look at the abuse, intimidation and sexual violence inflicted on women. This is originally a pre-Me Too era novel and yet it captures all the anger and weariness of the movement perfectly.
Chastity's closest female friend, Carla is brutally attacked in a prolonged ordeal and the already damaged Chas has to endure yet more heartbreak as she attempts to process the news. Simone Buchholz never minimises the cataclysmic repercussions of the assault and it's this, rather than the investigation into the murdered men which weighs most heavily on the outwardly antagonistic yet paradoxically vulnerable Chas. Despite having friends and colleagues who are nearly as dysfunctional as she is, Chastity is a rather lonely, conflicted figure whose proximity to the self-destruct button is almost constant – but as she grapples with both her personal and professional life, she is eventually confronted with a rather unpalatable revelation and an intriguing moral quandary.
The atmospheric descriptions of a humid Hamburg parallels the fevered emotions of the characters perfectly; Simone Buchholz's gritty, whip-smart narrative is electrifyingly noir-ish and Rachel Ward's seamless translation captures not just the words but the distinctive rhythm of the prose. This series continues to hold me in its thrall; The Kitchen is another intense, stylish and compulsive read by this most original, outstanding author.
The Kitchen is published by Orenda Books and can be ordered directly from their website. Further purchasing links can be found here.
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About the Author
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About the Translator
Thanks for the blog tour support x
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