“Michael Gregorio” is the nom de plume of a husband and wife writing team specialising in superior historical crime fiction set in Prussia during the Enlightenment. Anyone looking for reassurance their reading matter is of a slightly higher brow than the usual genre fodder, could do far worse than dive into A Visible Darkness, the third of their Hanno Steffaniis series.

Part of the joy of historical crime series is encountering an unfamiliar but fully realised world. However some of these worlds tend to be more unfamiliar than others. Crime fiction is replete with various representations of Europe in the 30s, Europe at war, Victorian Britain, fin de siecle Paris, fin de siecle Vienna, Tudor London and the rest, but I think it is fair to say the Prussian Baltic in the early 19th Century is not an overworked setting.

At the beginning of A Visible Darkness Prussia, having been heavily defeated by the French at the battle of Jena, is enduring a harsh Napoleonic occupation. Magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis’ mentor, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is dead and Stiffeniis is going about his magistrating business in the provincial city of Lotingen under much-resented French restrictions. When the military governor insists he travel to the Baltic coast to investigate the gruesome murder of a woman employed in the lucrative amber industry, neither Stiffeniis nor his heavily pregnant wife want him to have anything to do with the investigation.  However the French will brook no interruptions to amber production, which they are plundering in order to fund imperial adventures in Spain and Russia.

What Stiffeniis finds in the Baltic amber town is an almost unimaginably harsh world, one built on the women’s highly dangerous work, spartan surroundings and a superstitious obsession with the amber itself. It is an obsession that has already transferred itself to the French. In contrast to the rest of Stiffeniis’ Enlightenment Prussia, this is a superstitious, almost medieval world that for its inhabitants is nasty, brutish and short. For the women it seems to likely to be nastier, more brutish and shorter than normal due to the presence of a crazed killer in the town. But is the killer a Frenchman a Prussian insurrectionist or something altogether more scary?

And off we go on a fast-paced, atmospheric story set against a clash of civilisations and juxtaposed world views. In many ways the story is fairly identikit, indeed on occasion it appears to be lifted from a 21st Century serial killer thriller, but the backdrop of the defeated, humiliated, hierarchical Prussians having to adjust to their new status as vassal of the French 3rd Estate is excellent.

Also interesting is Stiffeniis and the cast of supporting characters. Stiffeniis is a student of Kant and can be added to the ranks of novels that see major philosophers investigating brutal crimes. I suppose there are fashions in everything.

Even though the big twist can be spotted a good 200 pages before the actual denouement, A Visible Darkness is an enjoyable ride.  Fans of historical crime should dive right in.

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