Confessions at Dawn

To escape the stifling atmosphere of small-town life and an unhappy love affair, Harry Markowitz fled to West Berlin in the 1970s. After nearly fifty years, the now-retired Inspector Markowitz returns to the provinces. He wants at last to be with his youthful love, Marie Jo. But his former classmates, now well-established and settled into bourgeois life, pull every string to prevent this liaison, for a dark secret binds the old friends together. And one question still haunts Harry Markowitz before he can finally retire: Who was responsible for the death of Pitralon, whose body suddenly, during the graduation party at Goethe High School, dangled like a sack of potatoes from the stucco ceiling of his parents' grand villa?

A nearly forgotten criminal case, a reckoning with the 1970s-the era of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, of brutal teachers and fathers, and not least the time of anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, the far-left militant organization active in West Germany from 1970 to 1998. Perhaps a homage, but certainly a snapshot of the generation that followed the student movement of 1968. The novel Confessions at Dawn is the new crime novel by Jost Baum.