The Daniel LeClerc Mysteries

Daniel LeClerc came to West Berlin to escape his criminal past and start anew as a private detective. Then the Wall opened and suddenly the past was everywhere.

As he tries to find people who went missing during the forty years that the Cold War suppressed history and memory, Daniel realizes that his own history is entangled with this broken and dangerous place.

Vanish Like Water

A lonely young man, the only survivor of a subway flood during a wartime air raid, haunts the streets of East Berlin at night in search of the girl he saw in a forbidden underground theatre. Four decades later, an old man goes missing on the evening of November 9, 1989, as the Berlin Wall opens and the world celebrates.

Daniel LeClerc has spent much of his youth working as a smuggler, moving unseen through the shadows of the walled city. Now, on his first case as a private detective, he searches for the old man amidst the chaotic reunification of the capital. Daniel is about to discover the shocking truth that his parents never told him, about his own origins and the crimes that were concealed behind the Iron Curtain.

The Tears of Men

An unspeakable crime against a child comes to light, having been concealed for a decade by the lies of an entire generation. Could it be connected to the disappearance of a lonely middle-aged doctor, or to the three bodies revealed by the melting winter snow behind an East Berlin factory?

Private detective Daniel LeClerc is back: older, wiser and more suspicious. His investigation is complicated by a mischievous new client, by a beautiful and inquisitive Berlin cop, and by the return of the most frightening man who ever haunted his past.

Daniel must find the one person whose tragic history will unlock the secrets of a dreadful place where childhood was sent to die, and reveal the daring escape that made vengeance possible.

The King of Wasps

Who is assassinating the Russian mob bosses of eastern Berlin?

Six years after its political reunification, the German capital is more divided and broken than ever. The police are overwhelmed. Large sections of the city have been given up as lost to foreign mafia. Daniel LeClerc, hired to find a long-lost uncle and reunite a family divided by the Cold War, is doing his best to remain indifferent to the chaos, but that is proving difficult. 

When the police bring him news that one of his oldest friends has been murdered while carrying Daniel's name and phone number, the private detective begins to understand that he was not as disentangled from the city's history as he had hoped.