Inspector Hunkeler Investigates – serie

It is the end of October, the northern Swiss city of Basel is grey and wet. It could be December. It is just after midnight when Hunkeler, on his way home and slightly worse for wear, spots old man Hardy sitting on a bench under a streetlight. He wants to smoke a cigarette with him, but the usually very loquacious Hardy is silent - his throat a gaping wound. Turns out he was first strangled, then his left earlobe slit, his diamond stud stolen. The media and the police come quickly to the same conclusion: Hardy's murder was the work of a gang of Albanian drug smugglers. But for Hunkeler that seems too obvious. Hardy's murder has much in common with the case of Barbara Amsler, a prostitute also found killed with an ear slit, and her pearl stud missing. He follows his own intuition and the trail leads him deep into a dark world of bars, bordellos and strip clubs, but also into the corrupt core of some of Basel's political and industrial elite. More ominously, he will soon discover the consequences of certain events in recent Swiss history that those in power would prefer to keep far from the public eye.

A Lebanese man carrying diamonds in his bag is on the train from Frankfurt to Basel, a drug mule on the return journey. At the Basel train station Inspector Hunkeler is waiting for him after a tipoff from the German police. The courier manages to flush the stones away in the station WC. Erdogan, a young Turkish sewage worker, finds the diamonds in the pipes under the station. To him they mean wealth and the small hotel he always wanted to buy near his hometown. To his older Swiss girl-friend Erika, the stones signify the end of their life together. She knows that Erdogan has a wife and children in Turkey. For the courier, finding the stones is a matter of life and death. His employers are on their way to 'tidy things up'. For Hunkeler the stones are the only way to get to the people behind the drug trade. They turn out to include not only the bottom feeding drug gangs, but bankers and politicians very high up the Basel food chain.