Astrid Paprotta Sterntaucher (Star-Crossed) Eichborn, January 2002. 408 pp. ISBN 3-8218-0867-5 Police Constable Dorian Kammer is called out when the body of his younger brother Robin is discovered in a cemetery, lying above, not below, ground. The face is exposed but the body, covered with a blanket, is found to have suffered repeated stabbings. Such is the deceptively conventional opening to a highly unconventional crime novel, light-years away from your run-of-the-mill German Krimi and reminiscent rather of Ian Rankin or Val McDermid. We are plunged into a story of child abuse and sadistic practices, of a mother - a one-time Juliette Greco style singer and songwriter - who falls from grace into a life of unspeakable depravity, and of her sons, Dorian and Robin, who are the most pitiful of the victims of it. On the side of right are Chief Inspector Ina Henkel and Superintendent Alexander Kissel, but even they are only 'straight' in the strictly legal sense, she being a lesbian and he, to put it mildly, also following his own tastes. With recent horrific crimes of child abuse still in mind, and new ones constantly occurring, cruelties by parents against their children are not hard to believe in fact. In fiction the art of persuasion is still called for. Paprotta interweaves the progress of the police investigation with the goings-on in Dorian's increasingly disintegrating mind. There are flashbacks, time-shifts, internal monologues and instant thought processes triggered off by an incident or an object. In the course of all this she takes us into the Frankfurt red-light district, into a gruesome torture-house on the edge of the Riederwald woods, above all into the minds of the victimised brothers, one in a state of denial about his mother, the other consumed with hatred of her. Among the most inventive of the devices is the awareness by Dorian of the dead Robin being somehow inside him - not just his head, talking to him, but in his body, kicking and hurting him. And who killed Robin? That is only the last of the many surprises this gruesome tale holds in store.