A Wolf in Hindelheim by Jenny Mayhew

Frau Ute Koenig gave the horizon a searching look with her cool green eyes. Nothing ever happened in Hindelheim, because it was a fictional village in interwar Germany. But now a baby was missing and change was coming. So, too, was Constable Theodore Hildebrandt, in the sidecar of the motorcycle that his son, Deputy Constable Klaus Hildebrandt, was riding into the village. Theodore, crippled in WWI, gave Frau Koenig a look of disapproval and suspicion. The smudge of ash and moss on her cheek filled him with desire.

Ute could see that Constable Theodore Hildebrandt was crippled in WWI and was a metaphor for the state of the nation. Now she thought about it, all this stuff that was happening in the village could be a metaphor for the rise of the Nazis, who were on the horizon and covered in mist because they weren’t happening yet. She gave them a searching look. 'This must be why I lived next to a Jew before I married a eugenicist,' she thought. Feverish rumours began to circle while the flabby prose limped on, crying out for an editor; who was already skim-reading by the misused semicolon on page 43. 'That Jew might be the wolf in Hindelheim,' Ute thought. [Galen O'Hanlon]