The Sleepwalkers, Paul Grossman
The Sleepwalkers, Paul Grossman
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The Sleepwalkers

Author: Paul Grossman

Narrator: Christian Contreras

Unabridged: 10 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/12/2010


Synopsis

During the final weeks of the Weimar Republic, a young woman washes up in the Havel River in picture-perfect Old Spandau. Bodies in rivers are hardly news in the chaos of 1932 Berlin, maddened by years of war, defeat, revolution, inflation, depravity, and now the Great Depression. But this one is different. Her dark hair is too short. Her wisdom teeth have been removed, something few German girls could afford. And her legs, dotted with suture marks, are bizarrely deformed, as if someone had taken giant pliers and turned them around inside her skin.

Willi Kraus is a decorated soldier and Germany’s most celebrated Jewish detective, thanks to his recent success at nabbing a monstrous child killer. Sent to investigate the floater, his search leads him into a German underworld he hardly recognizes. A princess goes missing, a hypnotist has dark secrets to hide, and a new power is ushering in the tides of change: the Third Reich.

Reviews

Goodreads review by C.W. on September 13, 2011

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

Goodreads review by Jill on January 26, 2012

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

Goodreads review by Jane on December 26, 2011

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

Goodreads review by Karen on January 26, 2014

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

Goodreads review by Carol on October 09, 2021

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