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The Man From Berlin (Gregor Reinhardt, #1)

Luke McCallin

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Apr 02, 2020 Nancy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: wwii, too-fishy-to-finish, mystery

Too long, too convoluted, a protagonist too upright and too dull. Too bad, because the setup and setting had a lot of potential. Abandoned.

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Dec 01, 2020 Tony rated it liked it

Shelves: novels, setting-europe, crime, audio, war-ww2, historical-fiction

As a fan of crime fiction and World War II thrillers, this first in a trilogy looked to be right up my alley Of course, like most people likely to pick up this book, I'm a devotee of Philip Kerr's long-running Bernie Gunther series -- which set the standard for mashups of this type, featuring an ambivalent German investigator in the midst of World War II. Like Ben Pastor's "Martin Bora" series, this one features an Abwehr Captain who is pulled into a murder scene.

The setting is Sarajevo in 1943, As a fan of crime fiction and World War II thrillers, this first in a trilogy looked to be right up my alley Of course, like most people likely to pick up this book, I'm a devotee of Philip Kerr's long-running Bernie Gunther series -- which set the standard for mashups of this type, featuring an ambivalent German investigator in the midst of World War II. Like Ben Pastor's "Martin Bora" series, this one features an Abwehr Captain who is pulled into a murder scene.

The setting is Sarajevo in 1943, where Captain Gregor Reinhardt spends his days questioning captured communist partisans. However, when a German intelligence officer is found murdered along with a famous (and beautiful) Croatian propagandist, Reinhardt is put on the case due to his past as a detective for the Berlin police homicide squad. Additional similarities to Gunther are a bit disconcerting: dead wife, World War I heroics, disillusionment with the German national project, personal code of honor that's just waiting to be provoked...

The first half of the book is a bit of a struggle to wade through -- the writing is a bit lifeless and there's just a lot that needs to be set up. Even as someone who's read more than his fair share of World War II content, I got a little lost amidst all the different types of German units and offshoots, not to mention the various local Croat military and police forces that Reinhardt interacts with. Add in Italians and the local partisan underground, and it gets pretty dense -- of course, this is all perfectly historically accurate, as the various allegiances and relationships among all the various ethnic and national groups were far from clear-cut, but it doesn't exactly make for a page-turning narrative.

The story ends up following a fairly conventional path, as Reinhardt's investigation gets stonewalled, derailed, and red-herringed by a variety of players, and supported by unexpected allies. There are hidden cameras and secret dossiers, and so forth, all of which come together in an implausible but effective climax. Overall, the book suffers a lot from the bloat and slow pacing common to many first novels, but I'll likely track down the next two books and finish the series. ...more

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