The crime novel Hot July 1927 by contemporary Austrian bestselling author Andreas Pittler is the third in the Viennese Crimes series. The first novel in the series, 1913: A Case of Strange Suicide, begins with the seemingly banal suicide of an insignificant Austrian soldier, but gradually grows into a case of far more serious proportions. In the second book, entitled 1918: Murder at the End of the War, the quirky detective Bronstein investigates two cases: the murder of a young woman and the disappearance of a lieutenant general who was his commander on the battlefields of the First World War.
In the novel Hot July 1927, Bronstein investigates the murder of the unpopular shopkeeper Guschlbauer, in whose grocer's shop there are suspiciously frequent turns of young and beautiful saleswomen. At the same time, it follows the so-called Schattendorf incident, in which a forty-year-old auxiliary worker and an eight-year-old boy were killed in January of the same year. The perpetrators were acquitted, leading to riots, culminating in the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice. At the end of the book, the beautiful revolutionary Jelka appears again and helps Bronstein solve the case in a very unusual way.
Unlike the previous two books, Mountain July 1927 takes place not only in Vienna, but also in Semmering, a charming holiday landscape in the foothills of the Alps, and in the Upper Austrian countryside. As in them, it combines the capture of period police work and crime investigation with the description of the period atmosphere and the depiction of the everyday life of ordinary people.