Eva Maaser Das Puppenkind (The Baby Doll) Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, November 2000, 300 pp. ISBN 3-7466-1636-0 With crimes against young children one of the major issues of today, this ingenious puzzle of a thriller comes most carefully upon its hour. If one mentions also the fact that among other topics discussed are the plight of women desperate to conceive but unable to do so, teenage pregnancies, and the creation of 'perfect' children, the reader may fear that the resulting book would put sociology first and good storytelling nowhere. Happily, this is far from being the case. The setting for the plot is the small town of Steinfurt, and the action begins with the discovery in a pram outside a department store of a baby not only dead but long since stuffed and embalmed: a baby doll, in fact. Then another dead infant is found in the compost bin of a family of modest means. Surprise number one: the two cases are not linked; the second baby was still-born, to a very innocent girl, and her brother cleared up the mess. But then a third child vanishes. This is doubly serious because the infant, Sebastian Bauer, suffers from a lactose allergy which could prove fatal within a week. Will his kidnapper, man or woman, be found before this happens? The police work hard, and each member of the team has an individual preoccupation. The wife of one of them is desperate to have a child and is trying to persuade her husband to undergo treatment; another of the wives is shortly expecting one, and her husband's new-found interest in baby-clothes helps towards solving the crimes. A third, a female detective with two small children of her own, is particularly disgusted by the performance of a 'flasher' who also appears in the tale. It would be unfair to divulge the end, except to say that it involves a character who has been trained in a particular taxidermic technique known only to six people in the whole of Germany. Kid's stuff? Emphatically not.