Kim / Catherine

Kim in college.

Kim in the here and now.

Catherine at Lowell House.

Catherine hanging out with Carvaggio.

Catherine and Kim.

Kim Hays grew up in Puerto Rico, spent her high school years in Vancouver, worked in a Volvo factory in Sweden after college, and later took the Trans-Siberian railroad across the former Soviet Union before arriving in Japan.

So, it didn’t exactly shock her Lowell House roommate Catherine Puglisi to learn that Kim had decided to marry Peter Stucker and move to his hometown of Bern, Switzerland, 36 years ago.

It wasn’t exactly a perfect fit for an American feminist.  This was an aristocratic country, after all, where women didn’t get the vote until 1971, the year Kim and Catherine met at Harvard. 

But Kim was determined to make it work.  And she did. She and Peter raised a son, Kim became involved in cross-cultural training for international corporations; all appeared perfectly straightforward. It was only after Tommy left for college that the plot thickened.

Kim, an English History and Literature major, saw an opportunity to combine her outsider’s insights into Bernese society with her lifelong love of mysteries. The result? Pesticide, the debut novel in her “Polizei Bern” crime series featuring police detective Giuliani Linder and young associate Renzo Donatelli, which was shortlisted for the coveted British Crime Writers’ Debut Dagger Award.  Two more books quickly followed, a fourth is finished, and a fifth, Kim says, is “bubbling away” in her imagination.

To learn more, listen to this fascinating exchange between two old friends.