Dead of Night

by Simon Scarrow Book 2 in the CI Schenke series.

First published 2023

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4.4(5,421)

Berlin, January 1940. An SS doctor is found dead in circumstances that senior officials want recorded as suicide, but Horst Schenke recognises evidence of a carefully staged murder. His inquiry links the doctor to the unexplained death of a child and to medical practices the state intends to conceal. Ordered to abandon the case, Schenke continues privately and risks the attention of agencies for whom killing has become an administrative tool.

The case is dangerous because Schenke is investigating a system in which official crime can be protected by the state itself. The child’s death points toward medical practices that are politically authorised even when individual acts are concealed behind bureaucratic language.

Continuing the inquiry therefore risks more than professional punishment. In wartime Berlin, police authority is subordinate to SS power, and evidence can disappear along with witnesses. Schenke must decide whether solving one murder is possible when the institutions around him have normalised killing on a much larger scale.