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A catering company from Bielefeld is blackmailed.
Strangers post bad reviews on social networks.
He is desperate.
But his aunt is a regular customer at Yasemin's kiosk.
The young woman from Turkey has just had a baby and is becoming a helicopter mom.
But she and her friends start the investigation.
“A colorful bag full of lies” is the second book in the “Yasemins Kiosk” series by Christiane Antons.
And like the first, lifelike, funny, sometimes exciting.
A typical regional thriller.
Every area in Germany now produces murders from regional cultivation.
You have to look for a long time on the map to find a region or a larger city that is not the location of a crime series.
Gabriella Wollenhaupt had the journalist Maria Grappa uncover cases of corruption and other criminal offenses in Dortmund 30 times.
The Sauerland is just as popular as the Eifel, which has seen a real change of image due to the crime novels by Jacques Berndorf and Ralf Kramp.
From natural paradise to Krimiland, in which some hotels now even offer staged killer hunts.
Many years ago, journalists asked when the boom in regional thrillers would end again.
To date, there is no evidence of this.
600,000 Maria Grappa books have been sold in the past few decades.
Every year Gabriella Wollenhaupt has written a new crime novel, in addition to her main job as a journalist.
Of course, she was sitting at the source and incorporating satirical portraits of some real people from Dortmund - called "Bierstadt" in her books.
A gentleman in the novel wore a sadomasochistic outfit that insiders could recognize as the chairman of the city council.
Gabriella Wollenhaupt almost always takes up the problems of today's Ruhr metropolis, social hardship, right-wing radicalism - in the current book “A Last Grappa” it is clan crime.
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The title is not chosen at random.
After 30 cases, Maria Grappa withdraws to Italy.
“She has aged with her author,” says 68-year-old Gabriella Wollenhaupt, who has been retired for five years.
Which doesn't mean she doesn't write crime novels anymore.
However, it is moving the setting from Dortmund to Berlin and from the present to the early 1930s.
And she also needs to do more research, because she is dealing with a real murder case in which three teenagers were on trial.
Incidentally, the grappa thrillers not only had fans in the Ruhr area.
“During readings in southern Germany,” Wollenhaupt explains, “people recognized their politics next door.
Many cities are similar, and corruption endangers people all over the world. "
Gabriella Wollenhaupt is quite critical of some regional thrillers in which the murders happen “sometimes in front of the dam, sometimes behind the dam”.
It takes places from reality, but it doesn't matter that the readers recognize them.
“If the stories are good,” she says, “they will work everywhere.” The term regional crime thriller came about 20 years ago as a delimitation.
These books were given little literary quality, according to the motto - as author and publisher Ralf Kramp put it - "you can also put bad material there".
Regional crime novels were bought because their own environment was there and people thought it was cool when a crime novel was set in their environment.
Model Agatha Christie
Ralf Kramp writes funny novels about the occasional jobber Herbie Feldmann, who talks to his invisible friend Julius all the time after a nervous breakdown.
The last book "Mord mit Eifelblick" is a gorgeous homage to Agatha Christie, elegant and stylish, next year "A Grave for Two" will appear, in which Herbie looks after a run-down gas station.
An old skeleton is found next door, and the farmers are hoping for a Roman grave in the Eifel.
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Ralf Kramp is also the managing director of KBV Verlag in Hillesheim.
For example, Aachen crime novels about the private detective Britta Sander and the works of the Krimicops appear here.
Behind this name are five real police officers from Düsseldorf and the Lower Rhine.
So Kramp should know how a good regional thriller works.
He reveals a few rules: “I don't have half-page reports on regional specialties or specialties.
We do not write travel guides.
I also don't like name dropping.
I only mention names and places if they play an important role in the book. "
Ralf Kramp has accompanied the development of the Eifel into a crime scene from the start.
“At the beginning there was criticism,” he says, “but then it transpired that the crime thrillers make the region interesting.” Especially since most regional thrillers come across as personable and do not contain violent depictions of violence like many Scandinavian thrillers.
“I especially like the lay investigators,” says Ralf Kramp.
People like Herbie Feldmann who happened to stumble into the investigation.
This also applies to the women's team that Christiane Antons devised in Bielefeld.
The fact that Grafit Verlag classifies them in the category of “cozy crime” does not bother them.
“The focus is clearly on the characters, and we learn a lot about their lives,” she says.
“I would like to have the three women as friends.” The trio consists of the kiosk owner Yasemin, who still runs a semi-legal hairdressing salon.
Then there are the policewoman Nina, who was suspended from duty after a breakaway, and Doro, who hardly dares to leave her apartment.
Three women, three generations, each carrying their own package.
But when they combine their talents, they often find out more than the police.
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If Nina now has to do social hours in the cemetery, it is specifically the dead field in the Schildesche district.
And of course Christiane Antons took a close look at it and was shown around there.
The details have to be right.
“But I also take the liberty of inventing places,” she says.
For example, an abandoned house in the forest where a kidnapper kidnapped her victim.
The 41-year-old author has nothing against the term “regional crime thriller”, although she also points out that the books are also read outside of East Westphalia.
“But thrillers always take place somewhere, and it's essentially about friendship and home.
An important question is: What do I need to feel at home? "
Murderous homeland novels
Crimes with a feelgood factor - it is probably this combination that has made regional crime novels so successful for decades.
However, it would be a fallacy to simply publish a crime thriller from every dump and automatically sell books.
Ralf Kramp even says: "I still feel jittery when we open up a new region." The publisher wonders whether there are enough bookshops that can be partners, enough readers who are really interested in the area.
Kramp himself always takes crime novels with him on trips that are set in the respective locations.
Because in this way he can learn something about the people there in an entertaining way.
"Every region shapes the people who live in it," says Christiane Antons.
And so the regional thrillers are also homeland novels in a special way.
Welt am Sonntag - Packshot