Last year, I began attempting to read fiction beyond America.  I believe it’s important and necessary to read novels from around the world to widen my view of how stories are told.  I read two novels from France last year and I thought this summer I would read novels from Germany.

Blue Night by Simone Buchholz came onto my radar last year, but I was not in the mood for a crime novel. Well, a year has passed, and I was ready to read this book.

A severely beaten man is left for dead on the streets of Hamburg, Germany and state prosecutor Chasity Riley has come into contact with this person.  However, she has been transferred to the witness protection program for the Hamburg Police Department to keep her out of trouble.

Riley gets assigned to figure what happened to this man and her detective prowess kicks-in as she is determined to find out why he was left dead and who was responsible.

Blue Night is the first novel in the Chasity Riley series that has been translated into English. Even though, there are five prior Chasity Riley novels in German.  Blue Night is a standalone book, and I did not feel that I was missing anything that happened in the prior novels.  Buchholz has written an interesting crime novel set in Hamburg and I hope more novels get translated into English.

I will admit that Buchholz writes mostly in first-person viewpoint from Chasity’s perspective.  However, she switches to third-person viewpoint to captures the thoughts and feelings of the other characters that are a part of Chasity’s world. It was a little jarring at first to switch from first to third-person viewpoint. But, I kept reading and those switching viewpoints did not bother me anymore.

If you are looking to read something outside of contemporary American crime fiction, then I will recommend Blue Night as your entryway into the vast world of international crime fiction.