Poacher's Road

For millenia, the remote valleys of southern Austria have seen their smugglers, their hunters and their wars. are Bodies in the forest a sign that an old order has not released its grip?


It has been a long winter here in the hills of southern Austria.  Felix Kimmel, officer with the Gendarmerie, is staring at two bodies on a path in the woods. This murder is beyond the expertise of his local detachment.


The Kripo from Graz soon take over.  Experts they may be, but they want his help: he is a local, right?  But Felix's mentor, the old hand Gebhart, warns him to beware of these slick detectives as they have their own agenda.


The dead men seem to be ausländers, Eastern Europeans. An autopsy reveals a diamond in one’s digestive tract, and on the other, a tattoo. Then, the family whose call to the Gendarmerie led to the discovery of the bodies, perishes in a fire. Felix senses that the Kripo detectives’ attitude to him has altered.  Maybe he knows more than he lets on…? And, they hint, whoever set fire to that farmhouse may come after Felix next...


 When he finds old maps that his father had hidden, he begins to wonder if his own tangled family history is not part of this.  He must discover what his loathed grandfather Kimmel knew, or did, before the Kripo does.  He sets out  on that narrow, winding mountain road that climbs to the remote Kimmel farm.  This is where history and politics collide, where the global crime wave that is sweeping across Europe crashes into a small town cop.