The Sleepwalkers

Berlin 1932. In the final weeks of the Weimar Republic as Hitler and his National Socialist party angle to assume control of Germany beautiful girls are seen sleepwalking through the streets. Then a young woman of mysterious origin with her legs bizarrely deformed is pulled dead from the Havel River. Willi Kraus a high ranking detective in Berlin''s police force begins a murder investigation.A decorated World War I hero and the nation''s most famous detective Willi also is a Jew. Despite his elite status in the criminal police he is disturbed by the direction Germany is taking. Working urgently to identify the dead woman and solve the murder Willi finds his superiors diverting him at every turn and is forced to waste precious time on a politically-sensitive missing person case. Colleagues seem to avoid him; a man on a streetcar stops him from reading a newspaper over his shoulder; he is uncomfortably aware of being watched. But he persists and soon enters the dangerous Berlin underworld of debauched nightclubs prostitutes with secrets to hide and a hypnotist with troubling connections.As he moves through darkness closer to the truth Willi begins to understand that much more than the solution to a murder is at stake. What he discovers will mean that his life the lives of his friends and family and Germany itself will never be the same The Sleepwalkers is a powerful dramatic debut thriller of a nation''s unstoppable corruption featuring a good man trapped between his duty to serve and his grave doubts about what and who he serves.