Most of you will recognize Kim Hays’ name. She’s a regular participant here on the blog, but especially on Thursdays. Kim’s third Linder and Donatelli mystery in her Polizei Bern series, A Fondness for Truth, was just released. In my questions for Sunday Spotlight, I asked her to provide some background, and tell us about her series and the latest book. Thank you, Kim, for taking the time to do this.

Kim, would you introduce yourself to readers as a citizen of the world, and a writer?

I’d be glad to, Lesa—although I don’t think of myself as a citizen of the world. However, I
am a citizen of two different countries—the United States and Switzerland—which means I
have two passports. The Swiss citizenship came to me automatically when I married my
Swiss husband and moved to Bern, his hometown in the German-speaking part of
Switzerland. Twenty-five years later, after our son left for college, I started writing police
procedurals set in our city: the Polizei Bern series.

Moving to Switzerland was not as big a shock for me as it might been because I’d already
lived outside the US. My adventures began when I was five, and my father got a job with an
international paper-making company in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My parents and little sister
and I moved to San Juan from Lynchburg, Virginia, and I attended first through tenth grade
there.

Today, my sister and I share happy memories of living in San Juan’s Old Town with its
cobblestone streets and sixteenth-century churches and going to the beach with our parents
almost every Sunday. It was a shock for both of us when my father’s work took us to West
Vancouver. But British Columbia is beautiful in a different way, and we still got to live within
walking distance of the ocean, even if it was the Pacific and not the Atlantic.

I did my last two years of high school in West Vancouver and then four years of college in
Cambridge, MA. That was followed by a year in Sweden that included four months of
building car engines for Saab. I returned from Stockholm to the US roundaboutly by flying to
Moscow, taking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Nakhodka, catching a boat to Yokohama, and
spending six weeks in Tokyo. (Now that really was an adventure!)

In the following years, I lived in Indiana, Massachusetts again, and finally, California, where
I got a Ph.D. in cultural sociology from UC Berkeley. And then it was time for Switzerland,
where I’ve remained very happily in Bern for three-and-a-half decades. I’ve kept traveling,
now with my husband, mainly through Europe but also to countries in Asia, North and South
America, Africa, and Oceania! But we’ve always lived in Bern.

I read your biography on your webpage. Tell us about meeting your husband, moving to Switzerland, and any culture shocks that came with that move.

My parents, children of the Depression, were always careful with money, but when I started
working full-time, I was not. That is to say, I saved for eleven months of the year and then
blew my savings on a four-week trip to Greece, Italy, France, Germany—any place in Europe
was a draw. The year I was twenty-six, my friend Robin and I spent a week in Paris and then
took off for Provence.

During that trip to Southern France, in the medieval city of Avignon, Robin and I sat down at
one end of a curved stone bench that looked out over the ruined Avignon Bridge. On the other
end of the bench sat a young man who started to talk with us. His language was German, but
he spoke some English, so we invited him to have dinner with us, and it turned out he was
staying in the same very cheap hotel that we were. The three of us spent the following day
being tourists together. Then our ways parted, but we arranged to meet again several days
later in Arles, where we had another dinner together and exchanged names and addresses.
The man’s name was Peter, and he lived in Bern, where I’d never been.

Seven years, many letters, and several trans-Atlantic flights later, Peter and I got married in
my parents’ home in North Carolina, and within a week, I’d moved to Bern.

When I moved into Peter’s apartment, he was working as a software developer, and I was
writing a Ph.D. dissertation, having completed all my fieldwork in the US the year before.
This gave me enough free time to study standard written German and, eventually, become
comfortable with the collection of local dialects that make up the language called Swiss
German. My husband’s friends and family and many other Swiss opened their arms and
hearts to me, but the conversation at dinner parties was still in Bernese dialect.

For someone who likes to talk as much as I do, it was frustrating to spend entire evenings
struggling to grasp what everyone was talking about, knowing that by the time I managed to
formulate a comment, the conversation would be several topics further along. Still, these
friends did me a huge favor. I know foreigners in Bern who’ve never learned to understand
Swiss German; the only reason I do is that no one was “kind” enough to switch to English or
standard German just for me. I’m still grateful for the long-term independence that my short-
term discomfort at parties gave me.

I suffered one culture shock after another during my first few years in Bern. One of my many
problems was figuring out who to kiss and who to shake hands with. In Bern, men and
women friends kiss three times on alternate cheeks; women kiss other women this way as
well. That’s a lot of kissing, multiplied by the fact that people kiss like this both when they
meet and when they part, even after a ten-minute chat on a street corner. I found all this
kissing odd, but I was game. After all, when in Rome . . . right? But who exactly counted as a
“friend?” I barely knew anyone in Bern well; still, Peter and I seemed to spend half our time
kissing people.

I learned my lesson when we attended a large, elegant party given by Peter’s employer, where
I proceeded to kiss just about everyone he introduced me to, including not only his male
colleagues but also his boss, his boss’s boss, and his boss’s boss’s very posh wife. All the
men, at least, returned my kisses enthusiastically, but Peter had to shepherd me quietly into a
corner and explain that a handshake was sufficient for everyone.

Tell us about your Polizei Bern series, please. How do you research this series? Have you met with police in Switzerland?

I’ve written four books in the Polizei Bern series, and three have been published: Pesticide
(2022), Sons and Brothers (2023), and A Fondness for Truth, which just came out on April 16.
They feature a Canton of Bern homicide detective in her late forties, Giuliana Linder, and
her sometime-assistant Renzo Donatelli, a second-generation Italian immigrant in his thirties.

Although I enjoy mysteries with loner cops and heavy-drinking private eyes, I wanted my
police officers to have spouses and children so I could show them struggling to have happy
family lives and do their jobs well. Giuliana copes because her freelance journalist husband
carries most of the weight of home-making and child-raising, but Renzo’s wife deeply resents
her husband’s job and how it burdens her.

At the start of my first Polizei Bern book, Pesticide, Renzo has become aware that he not
only likes and respects Giuliana as a colleague but is also very attracted to her. His sexual
interest in her and her ambivalent reaction to him is a theme throughout the first four books.

My two detectives often reflect on the moral dilemmas built into their roles as police who
investigate murders. This may explain why mystery author Julia Spencer-Fleming wrote in
her endorsement of Sons and Brothers that Giuliana and Renzo were “compassionate,
conflicted, and utterly compelling.” Imagine how happy I was with her praise!

When I started writing the series, I wanted to entertain, raise moral questions, and show my
readers an appealing but realistic portrait of my adopted country, Switzerland. I also found
myself writing a love letter to Bern, this magnificent medieval city I’ve come to know like a
best friend. In each book, I’ve introduced real concerns and problems that affect Swiss daily
life, researching them in the library and online and conducting interviews and site visits. In
my book about growing organic food, I talked to farmers and toured a farm; for the fourth
one centering around Bern’s cathedral, I spent hours in the church and even more time with
its current and former employees. I’ve also discussed Bern’s illegal drug trade with
prosecuting attorneys and attended local trials for murder and attempted murder.

I imagine much of this research is standard procedure for mystery writers. I think I’ve been
luckier than many authors, however, in having a high-ranking policewoman—one with a
husband and two children like Giuliana—as a neighbor. Over glasses of wine and occasional
dinners, she has answered hundreds of questions, and during her vacations, she has read and
commented on my manuscripts. I’m immeasurably grateful to her.

Here’s the question that may be the most difficult. What one author is your favorite, and why?

You’re right, Lesa; that is a tough question. Like many mystery fans, I have a list of at least
twenty-five crime-fiction authors—American, Australian, Canadian, British, and
Irish—whose new books I never miss. As I read new (to me) writers, I keep adding more
names to that list. At the same time, I enjoy other genre fiction—fantasies, science fiction,
and romances—not to mention so-called literary fiction. So many books, so little time!

But I’m evading the question, I know. So here goes. Two mystery writers stand out as having
influenced my writing the most. One is Donna Leon, an American who writes about
Commissario Guido Brunetti, a policeman solving crimes in Venice. Brunetti’s qualities as a
cop and a human being, his relationship with his wife and children, and his familiarity with
and love of Venice inspired me when I began to write the Polizei Bern series. The other crime
fiction writer I particularly revere is Michael Connelly, a preeminent writer of police
procedurals, my favorite type of mystery, which is why I write them.

But still, I’m not answering your question. I look up to Donna Leon and Michael Connelly
for their skill and influence on me. But the mystery writer I love, whose books I read over
and over, is Josephine Tey, a Scot whose real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952).
She wrote more plays than crime novels; still, the eight mysteries she produced are
wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking. Five feature her Scotland Yard Inspector
Alan Grant, and three—Brat Farrar, The Franchise Affair, and Miss Pym Disposes—stand
alone. Like all mysteries from the first half of the twentieth century, they have their dated
moments, but I recommend them to anyone who hasn’t read them.

Thank you, Kim, for your thoughtful answers for Sunday Spotlight.

Here’s the summary of Kim Hays’ latest book, A Fondness for Truth.

A Fondness for Truth: Summary

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.
As Bern homicide detective Giuliana Linder pieces together the details of Andi and Nisha’s lives, her
assistant Renzo Donatelli looks into Andi’s job advising young men who’ve been drafted into
Switzerland’s civilian service. Working closely together on the case, Giuliana and Renzo are again
tempted to become more than just friendly colleagues. 

As both detectives dig into Andi’s life, one thing becomes clear: Andi’s friends and family may have
loved her for her honesty, but her outspoken integrity threatened others, including, perhaps, her killer.