Chastity Riley is the state prosecutor who works with Hamburg police while she tries to figure out her complicated personal life in the newest entry to Simone Buchholz’s series titled Mexico Street.

With vandals routinely setting cars on fire, the Special Forces team, led by Ivo Stepanovic, are called in when one of these cars is found to contain a body.

Nouri Saroukhan is the estranged son of a Bremen gang of thugs who treat their family worse than their enemies at times. The tight-lipped and even tighter-wound clan have a feud with a rival family. It doesn’t help that Nouri loves a girl from the other clan.

What could be a simple feud gone too far turns instead to have threads connecting it to the financial district, while both families look for Aliza, a strong young woman on the run.

Tightly plotted, the story shows how some cultures within Germany are stuck in the past in terms of male dominance and female roles. There are difficult stories Riley confronts, and they add to her own darkness.

Riley is the quintessential noir heroine: this is a woman who drinks too much and smokes too much, yet there is something attractive about her tough exterior that draws people to her.

Buchholz’s writing has a dark tone awash with sparkling and observant prose that adds to the noir feel of the book. While this is book three in the series, it is Auntie M’s first brush with Buchholz and Riley, and it certainly won’t be her last.