Poacher's Road

For centuries, the remote valleys of southern Austria have seen their smugglers, their hunters and their wars. Two bodies in the forest show that an old order lives on.

It has been a long winter here in the hills of southern Austria.  Inspektor Felix Kimmel, officer with the Austrian Gendarmerie, is staring at two bodies on a path in the woods. This is clearly beyond the abilities of his local Gendarmerie detachment.

The Kripo from Graz soon takes over.  Experts they may be, but they want his help: he is a local man who knows the area and its people. He is surely known locally as the son of the popular gendarmerie Hauptmann Felix Kimmel Senior, is he not, who died in that tragic accident?  Felix's mentor, the old hand Gebhart, warns him to beware of these detectives as they have their own agenda.

The dead men's identiies remains unknown, but they appear to be ausländers from Eastern Europe.  An autopsy reveals a tattoo on one, and a small diamond in the digestive tract of the other.   The tattoo suggests membership of a Croatian paramilitary gang.  The following day, the family whose call to the Gendarmerie led to the discovery of the bodies, perishes in a fire.

Felix quickly grasps that the Kripo detectives’ attitude to him has altered.  Maybe Felix knows more than he lets on…? They hint that whoever set fire to that farmhouse may want Felix next.   When he finds old maps that his father had hidden, he senses that the tangled histories of his own Kimmel family may be part of this murder case.   He must discover what his loathed grandfather Kimmel knew, or did, before the Kripo does. 

And so, Felix sets out to visit on that narrow, winding mountain road that climbs to the remote Kimmel farm.  This is where history, politics and crime crashes into the Kimmel family.