A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.
Longlisted for the CWA John Creasey Dagger 2013.
It's Dublin in 1934 when detective Stefan Gillespie arrests a German doctor and comes across Hannah Rosen who is seeking her missing friend Susan, who disappeared after a love affair with a Catholic priest. When bodies begin to accumulate in the mountains and connect with the case, the trail leads to the shadows of the Danzig streets against the sinister backdrop of the rise of the Nazi party and German nationalism. A dark, atmospheric thriller and a page-turner with a real sense of history. An impressive debut novel by a British television writer with a strong pedigree.
November 2012 Debut of the Month.
Prejudice, the church, illicit love affairs and murder are the intertwining themes of this evocative debut crime novel, set between Dublin and Danzig in the 1930s. The discovery of two bodies, seemingly executed with a bullet to the head, lead a detective and an outcast jewish woman into grave danger as they try to uncover the truth.
| Primary Genre | Historical Fiction |
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Closing date: 02/08/2026
Dublin 1934: Detective Stefan Gillespie arrests a German doctor and encounters Hannah Rosen desperate to find her friend Susan, a Jewish woman who disappeared after a love affair with a Catholic priest. When the bodies of a man and woman are found buried in the Dublin mountains, Stefan becomes involved in a complex case that takes him, and Hannah, across Europe to Danzig. Stefan and Hannah are drawn together in an unfamiliar city where the Nazi Party are gaining power. But in their quest to uncover the truth of what happened to Susan, they find themselves in grave danger ...
City of Shadows features in the following genres: Historical Fiction, Crime and Mystery, Debut Books of the Month, eBooks of the Month, Fiction, Recommendations
City of Shadows is available in Paperback
City of Shadows was written by Michael Russell and published by AVON, a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
City of Shadows has 468 pages
£8.99
