Having recently enjoyed the very witty Murder at the Castle (2021) by David Safier, which turned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel into an amateur sleuth, I went searching for more droll German crime fiction and, just as it’s turned into a series by Netflix, stumbled over the recently-translated Murder Mindfully (2019) by Karsten Dusse.

Our narrator is Björn Diemel, a lawyer for a reputable firm who has found himself in the unenviable position of exclusively representing one of its less attractive clients: criminal boss Dragan Sergowicz. Given that Sergowicz’s activities run almost exclusively in the drugs-weapons-prostitution-and-people-smuggling line, he’s seen as something of a “bleurgh client” and Björn has, by association, become a “bleurgh lawyer”, finding himself excluded from consideration for promotion, and generally treated by the firm as if they wished he didn’t exist…this, despite the frankly rather large sums of money he is making for both the partners and himself.

Long work days, and the stressful environment of trying to legitimise the business dealings of a violent and unpredictable gang leader have conspired to put a lot of stress on Björn’s home life: he is rarely there to spend time with his nearly 3 year-old daughter Emily, and this in turn has soured his marriage to Katharina — although, I’ll be honest, I found Katharina so unlikeable that I’d consider anything which got someone out of being married to her to be well worth the trouble. It is in this state that Björn consults Mindfulness coach Joschka Breitner and, as his cynicism about the practice begins to recede, finds himself dealing with his various problems by deep breathing, genuine appreciation of each moment, and a bloody swathe cut through the German underworld that would put the French Resistance to shame.

If the setup sounds unlikely, it is, but the fun is in seeing how Dusse slowly squeezes Björn via his involvement with Dragan to the point of no return, where violence becomes the quickest and easiest way out of a situation that threatens everything he holds dear. It’s hardly unexpected given the setup, but it’s made an enjoyable ride by the way Dusse captures some superb imagery (“Though [Dragan’s] muscular six-foot-four radiated an arrogant brutality, amid this shabby ambience he seemed a little out of place in his designer suit. Like a tiger hiding out in the meerkat enclosure.”) and the wonderful job Florian Duijsens has done bringing the crispness of Dusse’s drollness into English:

Toni was the sales manager for Dragan’s narcotics division. A hard-hitting wholesale dealer who was in no way Dragan’s inferior when it came to brutality. As with many successful felons, the intellectual acquisition of complex constellations of facts wasn’t one of his core competences.

Plus, Dusse’s just bloody funny at times:

Anyone who sweepingly states that all children are great is lying. Your own child, yes, they’re the greatest child in the world. And fortunately there’s quite a number of other children who seem likeable enough. Quite simply, though, there’s a whole bunch of kids that are just arseholes.

The frequent sharpness of some of Björn’s observations are part of what saved this for me, because at times the actions he takes are hard to justify — the treatment of the three stuck up men who run the daycare he’s trying to get his daughter into was, to my bourgeois tastes, perhaps half a step too far into brutality for the sake of it — and, really, the plot offers nothing that you haven’t seen several times before. The other intriguing aspect is how fully Dussen clearly believes in Mindfulness as a practice, and how adeptly he works some of its core principles into a story of a man decimating the German underworld one soulless gangster at a time.

The comedy is also, for the most part, very well-judged. Björn trying to work out the best way to cut a finger off a corpse was darkly, unexpectedly hilarious to me, and while some of the developments might reek of slightly hoary slapstick-adjacent fare — the magpie, the toy from McDonalds — they’re never used in the easy way that I feared they might be come the latter stages. Also, as no fan of books in which idiot protagonists simply stumble their way through criminous plots with no idea what they’re doing, I really did enjoy the deliberate nature of Björn’s decision-making, always looking for the positive when the situation keeps going against his intentions.

Was there anything else to appreciate about this situation? Well, at least the deceased died in a scenic environment, that was also positive. And I hadn’t shot him, that was positive insofar as it meant I could have a completely clear conscience…

There are flaws — outside of Björn and his family, it’s pretty difficult to keep the various gangsters straight: Murat and Boris and Toni and Igor and Stanislav and Walter all sort of blurring together, with only the driver Sasha, given a surprisingly sweet subplot, really standing out. And, perhaps intentionally though taken to a slightly absurd degree, Björn’s wife Katharina is, as I’ve said, incredibly hard to like, coming across as little more than a spoiled child who stamps her foot and threatens to take Björn’s daughter away from him (“As a lawyer, it was clear to me that even the most modern woman will gain sole custody as long as she invokes the nineteenth-century ideal of motherhood that still holds sway in the German courts.”) the second she doesn’t immediately get exactly everything she wants.

There’s also a real chance missed to do something intelligent with the police investigations that go on alongside the wholesale slaughter, with the police shown as being far from stupid — Björn’s surprise that they like “getting granular” in their investigations comes at a perfectly Columbo-esque moment where a reversal is teetering on the edge of revelation — but, well, nothing more than them being a slight inconvenience ever really transpires. For all the talk of the events in the book coming to overwhelm our protagonist, the final run is pretty free and easy, with the entire last 100 pages going exactly as he intends. Hardly overcoming-the-odds stuff.

In the end, Murder Mindfully is really just a sort of middle class fantasy: that of the supposedly powerless man getting back on the people who have sought to dominate and inconvenience him for so long. And, as such, it’s…fine. The angry young men who got excited by Fight Club (1999) and now unironically find themselves in middle management will probably unearth a lot more to enjoy here than I did, but if this sounds like your sort of thing then it probably is. I, however, shall take a breath, ground myself in the moment, and move on without any animus or regret about the time spent here. The only thing I want to kill is a few hours in a diverting way, and this fulfilled that brief more than adequately.