Polizei Bern #3 with Linder and Donatelli
Winner of a second-place Indie Reader Discovery Award for fiction in 2025
BookLife Editor’s Pick
“An absolutely riveting mystery.”
—William Kent Krueger, bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author
The third book in the Polizei Bern series by Kim Hays features detectives Linder and Donatelli in an outstanding mystery that never skimps on either the procedural elements of solving the murder or the humanity of those affected by the crime. The story is tightly plotted and paced, with new revelations peeling back like an onion to reach the heart of the murder. A top-notch mystery by an excellent writer.
—Text announcing the Indie Reader Discovery Award
“A Fondness for Truth . . . engages with societal conflicts that resonate. . . . Hays’s empathetic, entertaining, smartly plotted mystery will keep readers guessing . . . [in this] stellar series procedural with compelling detectives.”
—Editor’s Pick, BookLife Reviews (Publisher’s Weekly)
What happens in A Fondness for Truth?
Andi Eberhart is riding her bicycle home on an icy winter night when she is killed in a hit-and-run. Her devastated partner, Nisha, is convinced the death was no accident. Andi had been receiving homophobic hate mail for several years, and the letters grew uglier after the couple’s baby was born.
Bern homicide Detective Giuliana Linder is assigned to the investigation. As she pieces together the details of Andi and Nisha’s lives, her assistant Renzo Donatelli looks into Andi’s job advising young men drafted into Switzerland’s civilian service. Working closely together, Giuliana and Renzo are again tempted to become more than just friendly colleagues.
As the detectives dig into Andi’s life, it becomes clear that although her friends and family loved her for her honesty, her integrity threatened others—perhaps enough to get rid of her.
More great reviews for A FONDNESS FOR TRUTH
“If you thought Switzerland was all mountains, clocks, and bankers, Kim Hays will make you think again. In the venerable tradition of the police procedural and in precise, evocative prose, A Fondness for Truth pulls back the scenery curtain to reveal the reality: people are complex, darkness is as universal as light, and crime is everywhere.”
—SJ ROZAN, bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author of The Mayors of New York in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series
“With [Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli’s] powers of deduction once again on impressive display, this third outing is a fine addition to the series, with Hays remaining consistently focused on current affairs, international cultures, and hot topics. . . . A brisk, smoothly written police procedural from an author engaged with contemporary social issues.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In this third entry in her much-lauded Polizei Bern series, Kim Hays offers readers an utterly compelling and elegantly written police procedural. The thread of evidence followed by Linder and Donatelli, the novel’s homicide detectives, is seamlessly woven into the fabric of family stories, both ordinary and extraordinary, which makes the plotline all the more meaningful. Add to this a glimpse of Switzerland certainly new to me and, I’m sure, to lots of readers, and you have the perfect elements for an absolutely riveting mystery.”
—WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author of The River We Remember and the Cork O’Connor mysteries
Ask your local bookstore and your public library to order the Polizei Bern novels for their shelves. The latest, A Fondness for Truth, is available from Simon and Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Fondness-for-Truth/Kim-Hays/9781645060833.
To order the book directly from an independent bookshop: click on https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-fondness-of-truth-kim-hays/20237942?ean=9781645060833
Kim Hays 