CI Schenke

About the CI Schenke series

Simon Scarrow's CI Schenke novels move his historical fiction into 20th-century Berlin, following Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke of the Kripo (Berlin's criminal police) as he investigates murders under the Nazi regime, where solving a case honestly can be as dangerous as the crime itself. Blackout opens in the blacked-out Berlin of December 1939, months into the war, as Schenke hunts a serial killer targeting women under cover of the capital's mandatory nighttime blackout, all while trying not to draw the wrong kind of attention from the Gestapo and the party officials who'd rather the investigation went away. Dead of Night and A Death in Berlin follow Schenke through the war's escalating years, each novel pairing a self-contained murder investigation with the tightening machinery of the Nazi state around him.

Scarrow builds the series around the moral tightrope of an essentially decent policeman trying to do honest work inside a totalitarian system that punishes exactly that -- a premise closer to Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels than to Scarrow's own Roman fiction, though it shares his close attention to period detail and institutional pressure. Each book is a complete case with its own victims, suspects, and resolution, while Schenke's precarious position within the regime, his colleagues, and the war's advancing timeline develop across the series. As of A Death in Berlin (2025), the series is ongoing, with a fourth novel already confirmed for 2027.

How to read this series

Read in publication order -- Blackout (2021), Dead of Night (2023), A Death in Berlin (2025) -- which also tracks the advancing timeline of the war, from the winter of 1939 through the increasingly dangerous years that follow. Each novel is a complete murder investigation with its own resolution, so you're not left on a cliffhanger between books, but Schenke's standing with his superiors and the tightening grip of the regime around him build across the series and are easiest to follow in order. New readers need no knowledge of Scarrow's other series -- this is a separate, self-contained world set nearly two thousand years after Eagles of the Empire. A fourth novel is already confirmed for 2027, so the series remains active.