From Amazon.com
By day, England's Julian Rathbone is very much the serious novelist: he was twice a finalist for that country's prestigious Booker Prize. By night he becomes the author of political, darkly quirky thrillers like
Accidents Will Happen, published as a handsome paperback original. Renata Fechter is a dedicated police officer in a German city very much like Bremen. Because of a fight with her corrupt boss, Renata is put in charge of the Eco-Cops, a crew of misfits and losers who investigate (and often sweep under the rug) crimes involving industrial pollution. The murder of a gay activist starts off a complicated story of industrial intrigue. Fechter's sexy, somewhat shady Italian lover turns out to be involved in the illicit dumping of nuclear waste, and soon Renata is up to her neck in the mess. Another good Rathbone thriller,
Sand Blind, is also available in paperback.
From Kirkus Reviews
Nobody but the fledgling Regional Department for Environmental Crime (DUK in German) cares about Roger Vesper, an inoffensive lab technician at the Regional Cancer Hospital who may be the key to cracking a case involving some missing experimental antibiotics. And nobody cares any more when Vesper's arrested for the murder of Albert Huber, a clerk at the Radwasthaus plant that arranges disposal of low-level waste from nearby nuclear reactors. Only the Eco-Cops in the DUK suspect that this murder wasn't just gay-bashing--that Vesper may have been framed by powerful industrialists looking to cover their disposal of some decidedly high-level wastes. Since the DUK is something of a waste disposal unit itself--one member's been exiled from Vice, a second from Narcotics, a third from Traffic, and they all wish they were somewhere else--it's up to their chief, Renata Fechter, to follow the radioactive trail. But how can Renata get the goods on the bad guys when her own smooth lover, upscale car salesman Aldo Nerone, is so obviously in cahoots with them that he arranges for paparazzi to smear her by photographing her socializing topless with Aldo's understanding wife--unless, of course, she can get some cooperation out of the fly-by-night operators who are supposed to be spiriting the hot cargo out of the country? Rathbone (Sand Blind, 1994, etc.) keeps everything stylishly knowing, jaundiced, and off-kilter until the final movement, which smacks just a bit too much of Quentin Tarantino shootouts. --
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