Purpurland - Purpleland

283 pages, published by Grafit, Dortmund, in October 2003

As soldier sent to Afghanistan, Tim Sander sees some strange goings-on: an aid transport turns out to be a shipment of arms from Germany, a mountain village where the troop stops is fired on by the allies - later called a mistake. Neither the arms shipment nor the friendly fire is subjected to official investigation. Sander´s tour of duty ends four weeks later, but he cannot return straight to Düsseldorf and his wife Julia. First he is sent to a clinic in Radolfzell to recuperate. There he meets Felix May, a Special Branch officer who comes from the same city on the Rhine. May experienced a mission on which a harmless student was shot and killed, mistaken for a fleeing, drug-addicted robber. When May learns that his partner Kottmann, the unfortunate marksman, has committed suicide, he breaks off his course of treatment, blaming Ela Bach, director of KK 11 and the responsible officer in the case of the dead student, for Kottmann´s death. Bach, who feels guilty herself, plunges into her work in an attempt to forget what happened. She sets out in search of a missing prostitute who is on record as having suffered knife wounds. But then she is summoned to the site where a female corpse has been discovered, meeting May, now a member of the Police Inspector Mitte team. May knows the murdered woman: it is Julia Sander, whose photo Tim had shown him.
While the special commission soon focuses on Tim Sander as the suspect, Ela Bach and Felix May pursue their own theories: Bach thinks the murder is connected to the case of the missing prostitute, and May is convinced that Julia was killed by the junkie the student died for.
However, the dead woman has a few surprises for the investigators ...

Read what the press writes about Horst Eckert´s novels

"Nothing is what it seems to be. Eckert lets the reader take breath to take the breath at the next moment. He is close to his characters who step out of the pages with physical presence."
(Bergsträßer Anzeiger)