My Inner Child Wants to Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse

Karsten Dusse’s series of novels about Björn – lawyer turned mobster – now runs to five volumes in its native German. The first of these, Murder Mindfully, came out in translation in 2025 and also been adapted as a Netflix series. In that satirical first book, Björn gets himself in trouble with a gang of organised criminals but finds the by using the principles of mindfulness he can push through this. It’s not really a spoiler (given the title) that his mindfulness training also allows him to kill without conscience. The second book in the series (again translated by Florian Duijsens) – My Inner Child Wants to Murder Mindfully – takes up the story a few months after the events of the first book.

When this second books opens, Björn is still running a criminal organisation out of a building that also houses the day care centre that he took over (and which his 5-year-old attends). But despite swearing off murder, Björn is still having psychological issues and his estranged wife convinces him to go back to his therapist. That therapist introduces Björn to the concept of the “inner child” and the idea that some of the things that Björn does may be due to this subconscious voice and the need to come to terms with things that happenned in his childhood. Björn is convinced to make peace with his inner child but while doing so has a slew of new problems to deal with including a prisoner in his basement, someone trying to blackmail him, his involvement in a death during his holiday in the alps and the daycare centre parent committee. Luckily, Björn’s inner child has ideas of its own for dealing with these problems.

While there are five books in this series, already in this second book the concept feels like it is starting the strain. Dusse deliberately finds another area of “self-help” to mine for comedy – showing how these ideas, while useful to a degree, can be taken too far if taken literally. Dusse pushes this even further in this volume, giving Björn’s metaphorical inner child a literal voice. That said, there is still plenty of satire and comedy to be mined from this situation, no matter what the underlying philosophy. In particular, the juxtaposition of the organised crime business and the day care centre. And Dusse also uses the story to take aim at a range of societal issues, particularly urban environmentalism – both when it is over-earnest and when it is leveraged for corporate gain.

Murder Mindfully was a darkly enjoyable romp and My Inner Child Wants to Murder Mindfully continues in the same vein. There is something almost cartoonish about Björn, mild mannered lawyer on the outside, calculating crime boss with psychological problems on the inside. While this second book is already showing diminishing returns, it is likely that translations of the following three books is underway. And for those following along on TV, a second series of the franchise based on this book is already in development and due in 2026.

My Inner Child Wants to Murder Mindfully byt Karsten Dusse

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