caerrie's reviews
161 reviews

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.

I read this book once when I was far too young to enjoy it, and thought it was boring. It’s far from boring, it’s just… long. So long. Tolkien‘s characters will launch into page-long musings about their entire lines of ancestors and their people and their place in the world without any prompting (Gandalf makes fun of the hobbits for that, which is rather ironic). This is often interesting in parts, but rarely the whole way through. Still, a deserved classic! The four stars are largely due to the audiobook though. The way Serkis reads is pure magic, every character is perfectly distinctive and charming in their own way, with logical accents as well - people of the same race sound alike etc. Serkis is in fact so good that he can make Pippin imitating Gandalf actually sound like Pippin doing a Gandalf impression. I wouldn’t have loved this story nearly as much if it hadn’t been for the excellent performance!

I always told people this was tied with the third for my favourite in the series… but I get what people were on about now, it drags quite a bit in the middle and some parts are kind of annoying. I just love the creeping horror of this book so much, it still gets me - but it doesn’t quite manage to cover up other flaws as much as it used to.
The audiobook damn near ruined the book for me. Some voices given are downright offensive and the narrator keeps carrying the speaker‘s emotion and accent into the tag sentence, making it really hard to tell where the recorded speech ended.

The audiobook dampened my enjoyment quite a lot - the characters’ voices ranged from annoying (Ron, Malfoy) to frankly demeaning (Hagrid, Neville) and overall I thought it was oddly read - the characters’ emotions often bleeding into tag sentences so much it was hard to tell where the character stopped talking.

Great start, very good centrepiece in the middle, TERRIBLE third act. Once again, this author proves very adept at atmosphere and detail and just awful at constructing a plot. Still, this features the only character in Goldammer‘s work I’ve found genuinely interesting - unfortunately we don’t go anywhere with him, either. Also, the female characters are odd somehow, it’s not outwardly sexist but it’s something.