Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Ice Cold is a darkly unsettling crime novel set in Thirties Germany with the unique twist that Nazis play virtually no part whatsoever. Instead this is a grim tale of rape, murder, fragile dreams and lost lives – and a sad and desperate story it is too.

The novel begins with an official letter ordering suppression of any news regarding the crimes and execution of a man guilty of a decade long series of rapes and murders in the country lanes around Munich.  The execution follows immediately after and the rest of the novel looks backward to tell  how he and his victims cross paths over the course of the preceding ten years.

This story unfolds gradually through short elliptical chapters, working in reverse to reveal more and more of the story in confirming and confounding what has gone before. Some are raw police witness statements and suspect interviews, some are official log entries and others are snatches of first person narrative. This is precision tooled writing, with each chapter building on the ones that precede it. The cumulative effect is of a novel pushing the format not so it gets in the way of the story, but to help tell it more faithfully.

Ice Cold’s victims are mostly poor, bored young girls, typified by Kathie who leaves her countryside home to go to Munich in a doomed attempt to find work, love and happiness. Thwarted in her attempts, Kathie is soon drawn into a sleazy underworld which places her in grave danger. This is a pathetic story of small time lives cut adrift, of lost people and ultimately squalid ends. Although this is uneasy reading, Ice Cold is both gripping and moving.

Unsurprisingly, David Peace is quoted on the jacket as this is recognisably his world in both subject matter and style. Like the best of David Peace, Ice Cold requires a little bit of effort over the course of its unsettling 180 pages, but that effort is rewarded with something that is a fresh take on a hoary old chestnut and Ice Cold will live long in the mind.

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