The thrilling next book in the internationally bestselling series that began with Snow White Must Die

On a hot June day the body of a sixteen-year-old girl washes up on a river bank outside of Frankfurt. She has been brutally murdered, but no one comes forward with any information as to her identity. Even weeks later, the local police have not been able to identify her. Then a new case comes in: a popular television reporter is attacked, raped, and locked in the trunk of her own car. She survives—barely—and is able to supply certain hints to the police having to do with her recent investigations into a child welfare organization and the potential uncovering of a child pornography ring with members from the highest echelon of society.

As the two cases collide, Inspectors Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein dig deep into the past and underneath the veneer of bourgeois society to come up against a terrible secret that is about to impact their personal lives as well. In Nele Neuhaus’ second US publication of her enormously popular series, tensions run high, and a complex and unpredictable plot propels her characters forward at breakneck speed.

Detective Pia Kirchhoff is about to set off on a long-delayed honeymoon, when she receives a phone call. An elderly woman has been shot and killed while walking her dog. A short while later another murder is committed, and the modus operandi is eerily similar: a woman is killed by a bullet that smashes through her kitchen window—and in both cases the same weapon fired the shot. Two more murders follow in short order. None of the victims had enemies, and no one knows why they were singled out.

As fear of the Taunus Sniper grows among the local residents, pressure mounts on Detective Kirchhoff. She and her partner, Oliver von Bodenstein, search for a suspect who appears to murder at will, but as the investigation progresses, the officers uncover a human tragedy.

With a story ripped from the headlines, I Am Your Judge is tightly plotted and delivers surprise twists at every turn.

On a rainy November day, police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. In a trial based only on circumstantial evidence, twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his home town. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return? In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is–and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

The body of ninety-two-year-old Jossi Goldberg, Holocaust survivor and American citizen, is found shot to death execution style in his house near Frankfurt. A five-digit number is scrawled in blood at the murder scene. The autopsy reveals an old and unsuccessfully covered tattoo on the corpse’s arm—a blood type marker once used by Hitler’s SS. Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are faced with a riddle. Was the old man not Jewish after all? Who was he, really?

Two more, similar murders happen—one a wheelchair-bound old lady in a nursing home, the other a man with a cellar filled with Nazi paraphernalia—and slowly the connection between the victims becomes evident: all of them were lifelong friends with Vera Kaltensee, baroness, well-respected philanthropist, and head of an old, rich family that she rules with an iron fist. Pia and Oliver follow the trail, which leads them all the way back to the end of World War II and the area of Poland that then belonged to East Prussia. No one is who they claim to be, and things only begin to make sense when the two investigators realize what the bloody number stands for—and uncover an old diary and an eyewitness who is finally willing to come forward.

The Ice Queen, prequel to the bestseller Snow White Must Die, is a character- and plot-driven mystery about revenge, power, and secrets long forgotten, secrets from a time in German history that still affects the present.