Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
Night after night, cars are set alight across the German city of Hamburg, with no obvious pattern, no explanation and no suspect. Until, one night, on Mexico Street, a ghetto of high-rise blocks in the north of the city, a Fiat is torched. Only this car isn’t empty. The body of Nouri Saroukhan—prodigal son of the Bremen clan—is soon discovered, and the case becomes a homicide. Public prosecutor Chastity Riley is handed the investigation, which takes her deep into a criminal underground that snakes beneath the whole of Germany. And as details of Nouri’s background, including an illicit relationship with the mysterious Aliza, emerge, it becomes clear that these are not random attacks, and there are more on the cards.
Bestselling German crime writer Simone Buchholz combines slick storytelling with substance in her award-winning series centred on hard-living Hamburg public prosecutor Chastity Riley. When I reviewed the previous instalment, BETON ROUGE, in early 2019 I compared that book – my first introduction to Buchholz’s storytelling skills (as ably translated by Rachel Ward) – to a straight shot of top shelf liquor: “smooth yet fiery, packing a punch, full of substance but with no extraneous ingredients watering things down”.
The same description could apply to MEXICO STREET, which sees Riley stumbling into a troubling case entwined with a dangerous crime family in Bremen, a city about 75 miles from Hamburg. Cars are being torched night after night in Hamburg, seemingly at random, but things escalate for Riley and her police colleagues when a body is found in a burnt Fiat. Even worse, the dead man is Nouri Saroukhan, the scion of a gangster clan who somehow managed to escape from the contemporary version of tribal warfare that his insular family now wages. Was Nouri assassinated by a rival gang, or someone closer to home?
Riley teams once more with police officer Ivo Stepanovic of the special organized crime unit, and the duo head to Bremen to inform the family – who don’t seem to care about Nouri’s death – and uncover whether this one death is part of something far larger and more sinister. Street brawls with machetes, an illicit relationship, internecine feuds. There’s a touch of Romeo and Juliet to Mexico Street; ancient grudges and violence and brutality that spews forth, infecting all those who come into contact.
Buchholz, translated by Ward, guides readers into the world of the Mhallami, Arabic refugees who fled across the Middle East in decades past before finding a home in Germany. Extended families count their members in the hundreds, and range from doctors and lawyers to gangsters of all shades. Distrustful of outsiders, of authorities. Mexico Street is modern noir, with its taut storytelling, hard-bitten heroine, and underlying melancholy peppered with wry humour. Buchholz’s stories are dark – at times very dark in the places they scrabble – but not bleak. There’s a fizz, a poetry, and a sense of coolness. These are tales told in vivid snapshots that prick at the head and the heart. In a sea of good and great crime writing hailing from Europe, the Hamburg author brings something fresh and unique.
Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer from New Zealand, now living in London. In recent years he’s interviewed hundreds of crime writers and talked about the genre on national radio, top podcasts, and onstage at books festivals on three continents. He has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and the McIlvanney Prize, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. His first non-fiction book, SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, was published in 2020. You can heckle him on Twitter.
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