caerrie's reviews
159 reviews

Obsessed with the first third or so of this book. By the 75% mark i was seriously considering not finishing the novel. It is way too long, and the pacing is really off - this feels like a whole trilogy awkwardly crammed into a single book. Also while the allusions to real history are incredibly cool in theory, they’d work much better if they weren’t just… listed off on page after page?

Parts of this book are among the best I’ve ever read in my life (Théoden, Éowyn, the Ride of the Rohorrim, that ENDING…). Many others were such a struggle to get through I had to listen to them on double speed…

A shout out to Sylvester Groth here,  I’m very picky with German audiobooks but this was very well read, however little I enjoyed the book otherwise.

Rath is one of those unfortunate fictional detectives who seem rather dense most of the time. Any progress he makes is due to something that literally comes knocking on his door, follows him into a dark alley or falls right into his lap. He makes objectively dumb choices all the time (like trying to get rid of a gun by putting it into a box a colleague just came to collect from Rath’s office - who MUST know Rath was the only one who had access to it and consequently must have been the one to put it there. This somehow turns out well for him but like. It could have gone wrong a million ways. No human under the sun is THAT lucky.) but then he also has sudden moments of almost clairvoyant genius where he makes gigantic leaps in seconds that turn out to be correct. Now there’s nothing wrong with a slow detective, the book shouldn’t be over too quickly after all and it can be quite charming. Trouble is, Rath isn’t charming. He’s barely a character aside from a nebulous ambition to get back into the murder squad, in fact, and if anything he’s kind of a condescending arse. But not in a way that feels like a deliberate character trait - rather I suspect the author thinks Rath is just a cool dude, and didn’t make him this unlikeable and bland on purpose. He also only seems to display an emotion when he’s actively simulating one (and from the descriptions, I’d say he doesn’t even do that very convincingly). 

The setting also falls super flat - occasionally Kutscher remembers his time period and immediately creates a new side plot to include a handful of historical events, but it really doesn’t feel as though the plot *needed* to be set in the 1920s, which is a shame. There isn’t a sense of real atmosphere. And Rath in particular seems almost modern in his desperation to be better than everyone around him - turning his nose up at a bunch of schoolboys smoking, for example. I’m pretty sure that would not have been a novel sight in the 20s but he acts like the world is really going to the dogs of these kids are *smoking* now…

And despite namedropping a central place in Berlin every couple of passages, even the sense of place in this book is seriously lacking. Like sure, the boxing clubs and the coke would be out of place in other German cities of the time, but the book completely fails to give any kind of impression what it was like to stand in the old Berlin, which is genuinely heartbreaking. I thought that’s what it was so famous for…

Convoluted, inaccessible, I have zero desire to continue this series.