Book Title: A FONDNESS FOR TRUTH, the brand-new Polizei Bern mystery
Character Name: Renzo Donatelli
What do you do for a living?
I’m a cop. Specifically, I’m what the Canton of Bern Police call an investigator or Fahnder, a plain-clothes detective assigned to all kinds of cases: car thefts, drugs, break-ins, murders, you name it. I’m not a specialist like the homicide detectives I work with. That’s my ambition, to do homicide full-time.
Do you have a family?
I have two families. There’s my big Italian family—my mother, big brother, two sisters, sister- and brothers-in-law, and all the kids. That family used to include my father, but he died of lung cancer six years ago when I was barely thirty. His death—well, that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
When all of us have a Sunday lunch with my mother, we speak Italian because my parents were born in a village near Perugia. They came to Switzerland in their early twenties to get jobs here. Without our mother around, my brother and sisters and I speak mostly Swiss-German because we were born here in Bern, and all our schooling was in German. Actually, we speak a kind of linguistic mish-mash together.
Then there’s my Swiss-German wife Franzi and our two kids, Angelo, who’s five, and Antonietta, who’s almost four. My kids are . . . well, I adore them. I just don’t get to spend enough time with them. As for my wife, she hates my job because I’m never home. That’s a big problem for us.
How would you describe your childhood?
I was very happy. My parents worked endless hours when they first arrived in Switzerland, but by the time I was five or six, my father was a fireman, and my mother was working part-time in the factory instead of full-time. Since my father’s job required twenty-four-hour shifts, there were times when he was away for days. But sometimes, he was off work for almost a week and took care of us.
The oldest, Bianca, took on a lot of responsibility even before she was a teenager. The rest of us tease her about how bossy she was—and still is! But looking back now, I appreciate the stability Bianca gave us. As she got older, she made sure we three younger kids knew how to clean the house and cook. That’s turned out to be useful.
All the years I was at school, my older brother Davide was my god—this big, strong, smiling guy who was good at soccer and schoolwork and popular with everyone. He looked out for me and kept me out of trouble. Now I’m stronger than he is because I have to stay fit for the job, but I still look up to him and turn to him for advice.
Why did he have to keep you out of trouble?
Oh, it wasn’t anything big. I was this chubby, bookish kid with big glasses. I didn’t get bullied, but occasionally, some bigger guys would pick on me, and I’d lose my temper and try to fight one of them and get roughed up. That never happened with the same boys twice, though, after my big brother and his friends had a little chat with them. By the time I was fifteen, I’d gotten thinner and taller and much stronger—and I saved up for contact lenses. From then on, Davide had to keep me out of trouble with my mother because I disappeared a lot after school and at night with girls. He backed up all my stories about why I was late and where I’d been and even made up lies for me. I realize now that my parents—or at least my father—knew what was going on and played along, but then I wanted to keep it a secret.
Where do you live?
Like two-thirds of everyone else in Switzerland, Franzi and I live in a rented apartment. It’s in the southern part of Bern near the Aare River. Even though the place is within walking distance of a couple of parks and some forest land where the kids run around, I can drive to the police station in fifteen minutes. I could bike or take the tram to work, but I never do. I know all about looking out for the environment and trying to be green, and I believe in it, but—I love my Fiat!
Are you comfortable at your job—and do you think you’re good at it?
I’m comfortable with my colleagues at work, I enjoy being an investigator, and, yes, I’d say I’m good at it. During the first big case I worked on with Giuliana Linder, my favorite homicide detective, I had to conduct interviews in a village in the Three Lakes region. I’m a city boy—I barely know which end of a cow gives milk—and I was afraid I might not click with the farmers and villagers I needed to talk to. But they ended up giving me a lot of helpful information. One in particular opened up to me—a really good man. I liked him. Not that I phoned him after the case was over to say, “Let’s get a beer.” It’s not a good idea to get friendly with suspects. Every once in a while, I meet people during a case that I can imagine following up with—but I never do. You have to keep your distance in this job, and I don’t always find that easy.
This hit-and-run murder Giuliana and I are working on now is really getting to me. The more I look into the victim’s life and talk to her friends, the more I like her. It makes me very determined to catch her killer—but it makes me sad, too.
What’s your most pressing problem at the moment?
My marriage. It’s painful to talk about this, but my wife, Franzi, is so bitter about how much I’m away working that when I’m finally at home with her, all she wants to do is chew me out. Well, that and have sex, which is fine with me, but we never have a conversation. It’s not like I can tell her in detail about the cases I’m working on, but I could talk about what’s on my mind. She never asks anything about my job or my colleagues, though, and if I try getting into a conversation with her about my work, she cuts me off and says the last thing she wants to hear about is the bloody police. So I ask her about what she’s been up to at her job—she does drafting for an architect—and about her time with the kids, but she doesn’t want to share stories with me. It’s . . . God, it’s making us both miserable. And she complains about me to my sisters—that’s really below the belt.
What about your greatest source of joy?
My greatest source of joy is my kids. I enjoy every moment with them, even when they’re being difficult. Franzi says that’s only because I spend so little time with them: I leave before they get up in the morning, and if I’m lucky, I get home in time to bathe them, put them to bed, and read them a story. I suppose she’s right that if I spent long hours with them alone, I’d get fed up, but right now, they’re my delight.
My other source of joy is my job, especially when I’m working on a case with Giuliana Linder. She’s a kind of mentor for me, but even though she’s eleven years older than I am and in charge of the homicides we’re working on, she always treats me like a colleague and lets me work independently. We discuss our cases in detail, and we always have more than enough to talk about. And I make her laugh!
Do you have any enemies?
A couple of months ago, when Giuliana and I were investigating the murder of a surgeon who drowned in the Aare, the prosecutor assigned to the case tried to force Giuliana to handle it the way he wanted her to. He was fixated on the idea of one particular suspect being guilty and wanted her to stop following any other leads. He was harassing her, too—sexually, I mean—and trying to humiliate her. I was ready to go after the guy—God, I was so angry with him. I don’t mean I planned to beat him up; I’d have loved to do that, but it would have ended my career. No, I had a scheme in mind that would have humiliated him, but Giuliana talked me out of it.
Is there something you want that you don’t have?
I agreed to answer these questions openly, didn’t I? So the honest answer is that what I want and can’t have is Giuliana. At first, I tried to laugh off how I felt about her. I told myself I was too old for a crush on my boss and to get over it. But it’s more than that for me, and I know she wants me, too. Last summer we . . . we had a get-a-room moment on the Aare, and I thought we’d find ourselves a hotel room in the Old Town right then, but she said no. No affair. She doesn’t want to risk her family. Still, she made it clear that if she weren’t married, things would be different. So now we work together, and I love being on cases with her, but it’s driving me crazy. I feel angry with her sometimes, but . . . I try to accept her decision.
What do you think is your greatest personal failing?
Sometimes I think I’m too emotional to be a good cop. Or maybe I’m not professional or detached enough—something like that. I explained how I sometimes start to care about people I meet during investigations and end up worrying about them.
Being in love with Giuliana—that’s foolish, too. Maybe I need to accept that nothing’s going to happen there. But then she looks at me, and I know she’s thinking the same thing I am, and I’m back to hoping she’ll change her mind about us. I don’t want to be one of those men who wears a woman down, though—that’s pathetic. So, it’s all up to her.
A FONDNESS FOR TRUTH by Kim Hays
Honesty isn’t always the best policy in Kim Hays’ third Linder and Donatelli Mystery novel
Andi Eberhart is riding her bicycle home on an icy winter night when she is killed in a hit-and-run. Her devastated partner, Nisha, is convinced the death was no accident. Andi had been receiving homophobic hate mail for several years, and the letters grew uglier after the couple’s baby was born.
Bern homicide Detective Giuliana Linder is assigned to investigate what happened to Andi. As she pieces together the details of Andi and Nisha’s lives, her assistant Renzo Donatelli looks into Andi’s job advising young men drafted into Switzerland’s civilian service. Working closely together, Giuliana and Renzo are again tempted to become more than just friendly colleagues.
As both detectives dig into Andi’s life, one thing becomes clear: Andi’s friends and family may have loved her for her honesty, but her outspokenness threatened others—perhaps enough to get rid of her.
Mystery [Seventh Street Books, On Sale: April 16, 2024, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781645060833 / eISBN: 9781645060840]
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About Kim Hays
Kim Hays has made her home in Bern since she married a Swiss. Before that, she lived in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm, as well as around the United States. She has worked at a variety of jobs, from factory forewoman to director of a small nonprofit, and, in Switzerland, from university lecturer to cross-cultural trainer for several multinational firms. Kim has a BA from Harvard and a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley.
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