Thirty-seven years ago, I married a Swiss, and we moved to his hometown of Bern in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Bern is a city surrounded by a river, the Aare, with a cobblestoned medieval core, the Altstadt or Old Town. Our apartment is across the river from the Old Town, a place that I’ve come to know well and love extravagantly. My homage to Bern is a set of four contemporary police procedurals featuring a middle-aged woman detective, Giuliana Linder, and her younger assistant, Renzo Donatelli. The two cops prize working together and, unfortunately, since both are married with kids, are attracted to each other.
The latest of these four books, Splintered Justice, was published on April 15. Because I want you to see where the action in the book occurs, I’ve put together photographs of places important to the plot.
Bern’s magnificent medieval cathedral, or Münster, is central to the story because one of the main characters, Denis, lived in an apartment in the church bell tower as a child and now works as an assistant to a glass artist who is responsible for cleaning and repairing its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century stained-glass windows.
The book’s first chapter is a flashback to a ten-year-old Denis meeting Zora, who will become his best friend, and showing her some of his favorite things about the church.
Fifteen years later, Renzo, the younger of the two police detectives, is heading into the park on the south side of the Münster when a young teenager runs into him and takes off down a long flight of stairs to the Matte, the neighborhood below the Münster. Renzo’s police instincts kick in, and he chases the boy down the stairs, losing him somewhere on the Matte’s arcaded main street.
Renzo calls into the police station and learns that an attack has occurred in the Münster—someone, apparently the boy he was chasing, deliberately caused Denis, the young glassmaker, to fall off a scaffold. Renzo meets with the uniformed policeman called to the scene of Denis’s fall outside the church on the Münsterplatz, a square at the west end of the church where the main entrance is, along with the famous Last Judgment sculptures (1460-80) over the middle doors.
Zora, Denis’s childhood friend and the daughter of Croatian immigrants who came to Bern as refugees from the Yugoslav wars, has not seen Denis for fifteen years, but they meet again because of Denis’s fall from the scaffolding. She is now a gardener for the city who often works in Bern’s beautiful Schosshalden cemetery.
Zora’s father and stepmother have a one-room corner grocery shop in the Matte neighborhood below the Münster and only a block from the Aare River. Their apartment, where Zora was born, is above the shop.
One of the sources of Zora’s love of gardening is a plot of land near the shop. It’s far below the Münster, hidden from the streets of the Matte by walls and accessible only through a small, locked door. This “secret garden,” as Zora calls it when she shows it to Denis, is reclaimed land from the city that has been turned with much dedication into a terraced space where rare species of fruit and vegetables grow organically. Zora has been working as a volunteer gardener there since her early teens.
These are only some of the corners of Bern that provide settings for the newly published Splintered Justice. To learn more of the city’s secrets and get better acquainted with the characters you’ve met here, I hope you’ll read the fourth Linder and Donatelli book—and perhaps the three mysteries that come before it: Pesticide (2022), Sons and Brothers (2023), and A Fondness for Truth, all set in the city and canton of Bern.
Photo credits: I took most of these photos. As for the rest, the aerial shot of Bern is made available online by Bern Welcome, a tourism organization; the close-up of Archangel Michael in the Last Judgment sculpture is by Werner Forster; the photo of the garden behind walls in the Matte, the Stiftsgarten, is from the Vereinigte Altstadtleiste Bern. Peter Stucker took the photograph of the Aare from the Matte neighborhood.
Kim Hays, a citizen of Switzerland and the United States, has written four Polizei Bern books featuring Swiss homicide detectives Linder and Donatelli. She moved to Bern, her Swiss husband’s hometown, thirty-seven years ago, after growing up in San Juan and Vancouver and studying at Harvard and Berkeley. In Switzerland, she worked as a cross-cultural coach for multinational companies before becoming a mystery writer. The first Linder and Donatelli book, Pesticide(2022), was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery. It was followed by Sons and Brothers (2023), A Fondness for Truth (2024), which was a BookLife Editor’s Pick, and now, Splintered Justice.
