The Sleepwalkers

One of my favorite periods in 20th century history is pre-Nazi Berlin; a fragile time before the rise of an era of unspeakable darkness, when the city was a fabled cosmopolitan smorgasbord full of vibrancy- an international magnet for artists, bohemians, eccentrics, and the curious. The Berlin we kn......more

This book, set in late 1932 Weimar Germany, is one scary book. One reason I like dystopias so much is that the horrible people in them are just pretend. But the Nazis who came to power in early 1933 were not pretend, and they committed atrocious crimes. And this close-up look at Berlin just as the b......more

Where I got the book: LibraryThing Early Reviewers program Inspektor-Detektiv Willi Kraus's new case involves a corpse whose leg bones are the wrong way round. And a sleepwalking princess. Stringing together the clues drags him into contact with history; in Berlin in 1933, Hitler's National Socialist......more

So, this was blurbed as "a riveting debut" and praised by NPR, which raised my expectations a bit. It's a mystery thriller set in Weimar Germany, immediately before (and during) Hitler's rise to power. The setup is annoyingly familiar: a woman is found mutilated & murdered, a man has to solve the cr......more

Nazi thrillers are a difficult genre. There are a few classics, like THE ODESSA FILE by Frederick Forsyth, and THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Jack Higgins, and THE BERKUT by Joseph Heywood. Most of the rest are just sort of creepy and empty and depressing, like this book right here. There are so many pitfal......more