Death and the Devil [Kindle Edition]

This is an excellent book which I came across quite by chance.

It is well-written, historically accurate and very well put together. As a keen historian, I find nothing more annoying than historical novels that ignore historical fact and reality. This is not one of those annoying books; instead, it is a very honest historical reconstruction of a troubled period in Cologne's history, and its part in the Christian history of the West - all tied up in a microcosm in the small murder mystery that means much more than just the death of one man.

Who are the mysterious strangers who meet and discuss death so casually? And their agent - is he the Devil? And what about the innocents who live in Cologne who get caught in something well beyond their understanding or their everyday lives. An amazing amount of detail and action takes place in Cologne in this wonderful novel over a few days; and the reader gets caught up wholeheartedly in the fast yet thorough pace of the story.

Well worth reading - definitely a winner.

I read this more than 10 years ago, when it was published in my hometown Cologne as part of the Cologne crime fiction series. Loved it. It's a murder mystery mixed with a little bit of history about the most famous Gothic cathedral in the world. If you liked the Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, this is for you.

I can't decide whether giving this book three stars is too generous or not. Is the clunky prose, unconvincing dialogue and sometimes odd tone the fault of the author, or a too-literal translation? You'd have to be able to read it in the original German to know for sure.
It's a murder/horror story set in Cologne in 1260 as the new cathedral is going up. A mysterious group of wealthy citizens is planning some sort of coup which involves hiring an assassin who murders the cathedral's architect. This murder is witnessed by Jacob, a sneak thief living on his wits on the fringes of society, who is pursued through the city while he tries to expose the plot and stop more murders taking place.
Sounds exciting? Well, despite the complicated set-up it's basically an adventure yarn that, with a bit of editing, might make a good film in the Indiana Jones tradition - there's a lot of close shaves, fights, and hair's-breadth escapes from death.
Some of the book's faults are definitely down to the author, who obviously had ambitions to make it more than a mere adventure story. Be prepared for some very boring lectures on the politics and history of medieval Cologne, and some heavy-handed religious/philosphical discussions which don't bring much to the plot at all. I wish he'd spent more time on developing the characters and relationships, which are all rather two-dimensional - the romance in particular seems a bit of an afterthought. Despite the fact that the assassin is referred to as the devil, he didn't frighten me much. Most of the plotting 'patricians' are interchangeable, and they spend a lot of time talking about their enemy, the archbishop, who doesn't appear at all.
It's a convincing setting, he's obviously done his research, and if you like a historical murder mystery that's more of an action adventure then you might enjoy this, especially if you skip the boring bits. But just because there's a medieval cathedral being built, don't expect this to be anything like The Pillars of the Earth, which is a different sort of book and in a different league altogether. The horror element doesn't really work, and it's not a surprising plot - it's pretty obvious whom the assassin is going to try and kill at the end, and how. And I never really got to grips with exactly what the patrician conspiracy was all about, perhaps because it was buried in so much obtuse information.
So, lose the pretensions and edit out all the dull bits, make the reason for the coup clearer, create a more frightening villain, make all the main characters much more vivid, and this might make a good film. Mind you, if the author had done all that, and if the publishers had chosen a better translator, this would have made a much better book!