Review| Flight From Berlin, by David John

Full Title: Flight From Berlin
Author: David John
Genre: Historical Fiction/Thriller
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: July 10, 2012 (expected)
My Copy: Advance reader copy via Goodreads First Reads

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Berlin, 1936. The Olympics are underway and all eyes are on Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi propaganda machine has hidden its brutality from view, but there are those who still recognise the veiled terror. Eleanor Emerson, expelled from the US swim team, meets up with Richard Denham, a British journalist. Together, they learn that Berlin is center stage for more than just the Olympics. They find themselves in the middle of a very different kind of game, this one between the Gestapo and The British Secret Intelligence Service. There is a secret document that threatens to bring down the Third Reich, and Hitler's men want to get it before it is handed over to the SIS... by any means necessary.

Eleanor is a feisty young woman with a rebellious streak. Being quite the socialite, she gets herself kicked off the Olympic team en route to Berlin for partying a bit too hard. Her lines are fantastic and full of wit. She is a strong, likeable character. The same can be said for Denham, the cynical journalist determined to report the truth. He, too, is very well drawn. We get a great sense of how he values both his profession and his fellow man. All of the good guys stand out in their own way, in fact. For that bad guys, though, I was more likely to get them confused. They get a bit muddled, but I got them straightened out in the end.

The historical backdrop is phenomenal! So many real people and events are wonderfully woven into the story. The Olympics is the obvious, but the Hindenburg is also written in. Even the Wallis Simpson scandal gets a mention. Berlin itself comes to life. It’s easy to imagine what things were like back then, with the city being cleaned up to show a “nice” face to the world.

My main criticism, and the thing that really knocked the rating down a star, is the ending. I saw it coming pretty early on and spent the rest of the book hoping I was wrong. It’s just pretty predictable and...safe. It wraps the story up neatly and reconciles the book with actual events, but after such an exciting story I found myself wanting something radically different. Something that rewrote history entirely. Still, Flight From Berlin is a well written historical thriller. A must-read for anyone interested in this time in history, and great for fans of thrillers as well!

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*Can't add a review until book is released. Link will be edited in.

Review| The Pleasures of Men, by Kate Williams

Kate Williams’ The Pleasures of Men is a strange little book telling the strange tale of a strange protagonist and her strange thoughts. Can you guess what I’d call this book in a word? Strange.

Catherine is a troubled young woman living with her uncle in London. She undergoes some trauma as a child, and is now largely isolated. Rarely leaving the house, her imagination is her main company. When a serial killer begins murdering young women, Catherine tries to get inside his mind. She believes she can understand him. Catherine goes to the places where he has killed, the dirty streets where he roams. She imagines his past in vivid detail. She discovers, however, that things are not as they seem—that truth is a lot closer to home.

This books is well written and clearly well researched. This descriptions of London are vivid, the poverty is palpable. Still, it took awhile for me to get into it. The story starts off quite slowly. With shifting narratives in the beginning, it's difficult to parse out who is actually speaking: is it another person, or Catherine's imagination? Things becomes more clear in time, but at the start it’s a bit off-putting. At some point, however, the novel managed to snag my interest. I wanted to find out what Catherine's childhood trauma was, as well as the identity and motivations of the Man of Crows.

Bits of the plot can feel a bit contrived, though, and the biggest flaw is that it feels lacking in an apparent coherence. Still, the book overall is very dark and beautifully imagined. Anyone interested in Victorian England may enjoy this gothic thriller.

[Disclosure: I recieverd this book through a Shelf Awareness giveaway.]

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Review| Strindberg's Star: A Novel by Jan Wallentin

[I linked to this review previously, but I've decided to just post the whole thing here. Full disclosure: I won this book on Goodreads' First Reads.]

Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin features two mythical objects and tells of the lengths a secret society will go to in order to seize ownership of them.

Amateur diver Erik Hall finds one of the artifacts in a abandoned mine shaft. Lost for a century, the ankh has resurfaced and immediately draws the attention of the shady organization that has been looking for it. Erik quickly falls victim to those who seek the ankh. Thrown into the mix is Don Titelman, an unlikely hero who spends most of his days in a drug-induced haze. Together with his would-be lawyer, he flees Sweden to get to the bottom of the mystery of these objects that now plague him.

The novel moves between characters quite a bit. In part one, we visit Erik, Don, an intern, a photographer, and a few others. It is all written well enough for the reader to be able to hold them separately and not get confused, though. This character shuffling tones down a bit in parts two and three and the novel is the better for it. Don is perhaps the most well drawn character. His confusion and curiosity come through nicely. Everyone else seems to play a bit part, even Eva. She features in a greater part of the story, and yet it’s hard to feel very close to her.

This book also incorporates a lot of historical events into the story, showing the muddled past through a focused lense. It adds a new layer of meaning to the atrocities of the past, from the trenches of World War One to the concentration camps of World War Two. The novel is very well researched. All the events mesh seamlessly and real as the actual events.

Overall, this book was quite a ride. Well paced, it grabbed my interest from the start and held on. Much like Don, I needed to see the mystery through to the end. And the end of this novel is indeed very satisfying.

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