Shadow and Light (Paperback)

A suspicious suicide at a film studio sets off a chilling chain of events in the second of Rabb's Berlin-between-the-wars trilogy (Rosa, 2005).In 1919, Nikolai Hoffner was a Berlin detective with a bleak worldview. Now it's eight years later, and to describe Hoffner's worldview as bleak would be an unpardonable understatement, like calling Hitler mean-spirited. Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar (Chief Inspector) Hoffner sees both Berlin and himself as beyond redemption - the city because it has sunk into joyless decadence; himself because in the vital roles of husband and father he's been so total and abject a failure. All he shares with his sons, 16-year-old Georgi and 24-year-old Sascha, is the unshakable belief that he was responsible for the death of their mother. Still, he is once and forever a cop, unalterably skilled and efficient, and a cop's got to do what he's hard-wired to do. Within minutes after his arrival at Ufa, Berlin's major film studio, he recognizes that the suicide he's been summoned to validate is distinctly ersatz; in fact, it's a murder ineptly disguised. To begin with, no one can adequately explain why Gerhard Thyssen - a well-liked, successful executive - would want to kill himself. On the other hand, as Hoffner discovers when his investigation deepens, motives for murder are in unexpected profusion. Thyssen, like almost everyone else at Ufa, led a secret life involving a multiplicity of agendas, and before Hoffner can make sense of them all, he will find himself dealing with a surplus of bad guys.Rabb's prose can occasionally be provokingly gnomic, but as usual, he has a good story to tell and most readers will bear with him contentedly. (Kirkus Reviews)

Berlin 1927: when an executive at the newly-famous Ufa film studios is found dead in his bath, it falls to Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, of the Kriminalpolizei to investigate. With the help of the German film director Fritz Lang and the head of the most powerful crime syndicate, Hoffner finds his case reaches deep into Berlin's sex and drug trade, and into the political world of Hitler's Brownshirts (the SA). Caught up in this story is Hoffner's new lover, and his two sons, one of whom works for Joseph Goebbels. We last met Hoffner in Rosa (2007); his relationship with his sons develops menacingly in Shadow and Light.

General

Imprint:	Peter Halban Publishers Ltd
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	April 2009
Authors:	Jonathan Rabb
Dimensions:	220 x 189 x 29mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	384
ISBN-13:	978-1-905559-13-8
Categories:	Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > Adventure / thriller > General
LSN:	1-905559-13-5
Barcode:	9781905559138

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