SPLINTERED JUSTICE

I had more trouble finding a title for this fourth Linder and Donatelli mystery than for the others. Because the novel starts with an attempted murder in Bern’s largest Gothic church, the Berner Münster, I always thought of it as “the Münster book” and got stuck on that name.

My research for this new book was a delight. It required getting to know every corner of a magnificent church, reading about its history, and conducting interviews with people who have been involved with it over the past twenty years. One of the first things I did was track down why it’s called a Münster (in English, “minster,” as in Westminster Abbey), and not a cathedral. I discovered that a cathedral is the seat of a bishop, whereas a minster is initially associated with a monastery.

Other interesting facts about the Berner Münster:

• The building of the Münster began in 1421, but the 330-foot tower that was initially planned for it wasn’t added until 1893.
• The Gothic Münster was built on the site of a twelfth-century Romanesque church.
• In 1528, nine years after Martin Luther’s 99 Theses were published, Bern’s rulers declared the canton Protestant. At that point, most of the statues decorating the nave and chancel of the Münster were torn down and destroyed in a burst of officially sanctioned iconoclasm.
• Luckily, the fifteenth-century bas-relief sculptures making up The Last Judgement survived intact. They have been beautifully restored and still decorate the middle portal on the west front of the church.
• The higher of the two viewing platforms on the tower can be reached by climbing 344 steps. On your way up the narrow winding stairs, you pass Susanne, the largest bell in Switzerland. Weighing 22,000 pounds (10 metric tonnes), she has hung in Bern’s tower since 1611, along with six companions.
• The Münster is known for its spectacular late-Gothic stained-glass windows.

One of the people I talked to while researching this book was the Bernese glass artist who repairs the Münster’s windows. I had the fun of watching him work in his studio and even kept him company on a scaffold as he cleaned one of the windows. Thanks to him, there are two glassworkers in my fourth book. The younger of the two puts his hand through one of the medieval windows he is cleaning when someone attacks him.

I decided to let the young glassmaker’s broken window inspire the book’s title. The picture on the book’s cover, which shows Justitia’s sword and scales, is not from Bern’s Münster, although the importance of justice is well-represented by two statues at the church’s main doors. Instead, the cover photo is taken from a church window in Mechelen, Belgium. With a photoshopped hole punched into it, I decided the Belgian image was a good way to represent the precarious and incomplete kind of justice that Renzo Donatelli fears will be all he can extract from the case he’s pursuing.

Splintered Justice will be published by Seventh Street Books on April 15th and distributed by Simon and Schuster. You can see the cover below, learn more about the mystery here, and pre-order it from Amazon here. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.

Many of the photos I used were from the Bern Welcome website produced by our tourist office. The lovely photo of the Münster’s chancel with its dramatic stained-glass windows was taken by Eliana Corazzo Galassi. The picture of Bern’s Justitia statue is from a blog post called “Bern’s Historic Old City” on Daydream Tourist.