Crime Column Gaze: Better Than the FBI

On November 24, 1971, in Portland, Oregon, a man boards a plane bound for Seattle.

Shortly after takeoff, he gave the flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his luggage.

He demands $200,000 and four parachutes, he gets them and then disappears through the tailgate into the night.

To date, this man has not been found.

Just a few bucks of the money.

They dubbed him DB Cooper.

It's one of those unsolved crime mysteries that are prevalent in America and never fail to ignite the imagination.

Peter Korte

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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A German writer,

, made a novel out of this material and simply called it

(Piper, 224 p., born, €22).

Of course, he doesn't know any more than the FBI does, but he has some interesting guesses and ideas without getting bogged down in breakneck speculation.

For him, this Cooper is a man who has been to Vietnam, comes back dissatisfied with his life and wants a fresh start.

Not more.

Eisel describes the course of the action very soberly and clearly, gives space to the perceptions of the flight attendant, the pilot and co-pilot, lets an FBI agent who has worked on the case for many years in vain have his say, and also starts with all of this the American sensibilities of that time, in which the attitude towards the Vietnam War was central and divided society.

Documented and invented balance each other in Eisel's novel.

"Cooper" reads like a docudrama that takes a few literary liberties in view of the gaps in the factual.

The experiment was successful.

Once across Europe

It's often hard to understand why authors work with pseudonyms when you can find out who's behind it by googling it once.

, for example, is called Johann Fischler and has already published crime novels as Joe Fischler.

It may be that he doesn't want to scare off the friends of the investigators Valerie Mauser and Arno Bussi with the somewhat harder pace that is used in the Jan Beck thrillers.

"The track.

He will find you”

(Penguin, 416 p., br., €15) is the third appearance of the investigative duo Inga Björk and Christian Brand.

Instead of local color and amusement, thrillers want international flair or what they think is international flair, and then they have to be spectacular crimes that are vaguely staged, reminiscent of art installations and not of ordinary murder and manslaughter.

The action moves between Salzburg, Paris, Lisbon, Sweden, Bologna, Brussels and a few other locations.

The victims are presented as metal-clad statues with spears or as large clay figures.

There is also a cryptic text message that Brand receives on his smartphone.

The trail leads to a boarding school for gifted students near Bologna.

The tempo that Beck sets is high, the prose functional and unadorned, without stylistic blossoms or crooked images.

However, you never quite shake the impression that the plot is a bit too constructed and that this over-instrumentation is mainly intended to hide how pale all the characters are.

Tranquil in Zurich

Compared to the hectic investigations in half of Europe and the bold leap into the rough wilderness of the American Northwest, a thriller from Zurich seems very tranquil.

And

, who lives there, in the same studio where she also puts her novel heroine, likes the Gold Coast, the old town, the many waters far too much to want to ignite a hellfire or something similar in her first Zurich thriller.

Rosa Zambrano works for the Maritime Police, has recently been single, had egg cells frozen just in case - and then the gynecologist who treated her suddenly died.

(Diogenes, 272 p., br., 16.00 €) reads well, is loving in the details, but in its whole layout it is a bit stuffy, even if one or the other abyss can be found in smart Zurich.

But Rosa Zambrano could still improve.