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Product Description
Berlin 1927: when an executive at the newly-famous Ufa film studios is found dead in his bath, it falls to Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, of the Kriminalpolizei to investigate. With the help of the German film director Fritz Lang and the head of the most powerful crime syndicate, Hoffner finds his case reaches deep into Berlin's sex and drug trade, and into the political world of Hitler's Brownshirts (the SA). Caught up in this story is Hoffner's new lover, and his two sons, one of whom works for Joseph Goebbels. We last met Hoffner in Rosa (2007); his relationship with his sons develops menacingly in Shadow and Light.
About the Author
Jonathan Rabb is a full-time novelist who lives in New York City. Widely translated, he is rapidly becoming known as one of the strongest voices in thrillers. Now published by prestigious Farrar Straus in the US.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ultimately More Wearying than Entertaining,
By
This review is from: Shadow and Light: Rosa Trilogy Volume 2 (Hardcover)
As a big fan of Phillip Kerr's "Berlin Noir" series, I'm always interested to read more crime fiction set in Weimar-era and wartime Germany. This 1927-set crime novel also features the German film industry, which is another interest of mine, so it seemed totally up my alley. Things kick off when Berlin police chief inspector Nikoli Hoffner is sent out to the UFAstudio's campus to investigate a suicide. From the very start, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was some larger backstory to Hoffner that I had missed out on. And that, indeed, is the case: Hoffner was the protagonist of Rabb's earlier book, Rosa. That helps to explain a great deal of my dissatisfaction with Hoffner's character and some of the plot points, and so I would strongly recommend reading Rosa before picking this up.
This book is filled to the rim with intricate plotting based partly on the real-life "Phoebus Affair", as the murder leads Hoffner into a very confusing stew of industrial espionage, sexual debauchery and blackmail, the early days of National Socialism, and Berlin's dirty underbelly of gangsters, junkies, and thugs (not to mention cameos by Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Joseph Goebbels, and Alfred Hugenberg). Various corpses continue to appear along the way, as Hoffner stolidly picks away at the various strands that ultimately lead back to the Treaty of Versailles. Mixed up in all this is a sharp-tongued American dame of mysterious motives, whom Hoffner finds himself drawn to. There's also a running subplot involving Hoffner's strained attempts to connect with his two sons, one a teenager working at UFA, the other, a protege of Goebbels. While I was immersed in the dark moody world Rabb is able to bring to life, the story never quite coalesced into anything I could really grab a hold of. Alan Furst's novels of espionage capture the same tone, but are able to bring more solid storytelling to the fore. Here, the plotlines wander around bumping into each other, but by the end it's not clear what the point of it all is. (Nor is it at all clear in some cases how Hoffner makes various deductive leaps.) And as mentioned earlier, some key relationships (such as that between Hoffner and the gangster Alby Pimm, or Hoffner and his sons) are rather cryptic unless one has already read Rosa. It doesn't help that everyone speaks to each other in very clever banter that is entertaining to read, but feels more of the movies than real life. By the end, the book's channeling of Furst, Kerr, Isherwood's Berlin Novels, and The Maltese Falcon left me a more wearied than entertained.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark, atmospheric and portentous,
By
This review is from: Shadow and Light (Paperback)
In my highly subjective opinion, Jonathan Rabb is the best writer of intelligent and highly authentic thrillers in print today. He creates stories of immense intricacy that always reach a satisfactory conclusion, and his sense of atmosphere, character and event is astonishing.
Shadow and Light is the second Rabb novel to feature Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, the widowed Kripo detective estranged from his sons, who possesses an uncanny eye for detail and an amazing breadth of perspective, and yet who finds it hard to combat his own inner demons and self-destructiveness. The story is set in Berlin in the late twenties; the city is at its decadent height but all around the signs of danger from incipient fascism are evident, signs that bode ill for the city, for Germany as a whole, and, because of his Jewish mother, for Hoffner in particular. That the reader has this knowledge adds a power and poignancy to the story overall. In Shadow and Light a murder at a film studio leads Hoffner on a trail that takes in the film director Fritz Lang, the newspaper magnate Alfred Hugenberg and the shadowy Joseph Goebbels. He is hindered from time to time by family worries - his younger son has bunked off school to work at the film studios and his older son is mixed up with the Brownshirts. Hoffner pursues the case with help from the gloriously sinister Alby Pimm, and although he solves his case he ends up no better than he was before it began. Jonathan Rabb continues to delight with this second novel from Germany between the two World Wars, and it is to be hoped that there is at least one more Hoffner tale before he is engulfed by the tide of history.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (53 customer reviews) 29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Caught on Film,
By Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Shadow and Light: Rosa Trilogy Volume 2 (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme
As he had done in ROSA (the only other novel of his that I have read), Jonathan Rabb paints a wonderfully dark picture of Berlin in the twenties: drugs and alcohol amid the detritus of war, sexual excesses in the cabarets, and a gangster culture semi-tolerated. Ordinary working people, resentful and forgotten, are easily stirred by the rival forces of communism and the nascent Nazi party. Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, Rabb's antihero, threads a twisting path through this maze, which sometimes seems like a visit to the underworld.
Rabb's feeling for noir is appropriate here, since this novel centers around the German film industry, whose leading director, Fritz Lang, known as "the master of darkness", had just completed his monumental METROPOLIS. Lang is only one of some dozen real figures who appear in the novel, and not just in cameo roles either. Because Rabb is not writing a whodunnit -- even though the book begins with Hoffner being called to investigate a mysterious death at the Berlin film studios, UFA -- he can plunge even his real figures quite deep into the mud, knowing that little of it will ultimately stick. This is both the fascination of the book and its ultimate disappointment, because although people are more or less sorted into their respective camps by the end, very little light shines through the darkness -- the implication being that the shadows will continue to deepen right through the next decade. This is not always an easy book to read. The early pages involve more of Hoffner's back story than first-time readers may find approachable. It can be difficult to pick up cross-references even within the book itself; Rabb's style is episodic rather than linear. Then there are an unusual number of plot strands: pornographic movies, the introduction of the talkies, struggles between UFA and MGM, postwar rearmament, and the early activities of the Nazis. Even at the end, it is not clear how these all fit together. But Hoffner is an interesting character, and his involvement with Leni Coyle -- an American talent agent who may well have other motives for being in Berlin -- keeps both him and the reader on their toes. For me, though, the sequences that gave the book the most humanity were those involving Hoffner's two sons, especially the way the investigation brings him closer to the younger one, an absent father trying to make up for lost time. 17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great historical thriller,
By Jeffrey Phillips "Innovation and Team Product... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Shadow and Light: Rosa Trilogy Volume 2 (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme
Shadow and Light is an exceptionally interesting book, written about the period of time of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing rise of the Nazi party. Nominally it concerns the apparent suicide of a move studio executive and the investigation by a chief inspector, but it unfolds as so much more.
The investigation leads the inspector in a number of different paths, including the development of sound in the film industry, the rise of Goebbels and others in the Nazi party and the re-arming of the German Army. The investigation is fast paced and involves a beautiful femme fatale. One is never quite sure which side (of several) she is working for. The inspector plays a bit too close to type - too tired, too world weary, too all-knowing, and yet too often unable to bring all the pieces together. In many ways this book reminds me of some of Alan Furst's writings, which are all prologues to the Second World War. The author weaves together a number of interesting story lines, especially about the competition between the US and German film industries, and the rise of the Nazis and their propaganda machine. I would have enjoyed a bit more about the period, as the Weimar Republic is a fascinating time in history, stuck between two wars as Germany struggles with governance and recovery. The book is written in a style that reveals little, and it forces the reader to pay attention. The plotting unfolds slowly, and the number of intertwined story lines can be a bit murky at times, but this is an excellent read. 9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Berlin noir,
By Tim Beazley - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Shadow and Light: Rosa Trilogy Volume 2 (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme
"Shadow and Light" describes Berlin police inspector Nikolai Hoffner's investigation into the apparent murder of Herr Thyssen, a film studio executive, in 1927.
Berlin in 1927, shortly before the Nazis came to power, is a dark, decadent, dangerous city; and every twist and turn of the plot exposes more and more of the moral decay and political corruption of the time. Thyssen's murder -- if it was a murder -- may be related to his work at the movie studio. Movie studios around the world are trying to develop a technology to make "talkies." The potential financial rewards are enormous, so the competition is fierce, and some of the methods used to test the new technology -- sex films -- are not for the squeamish. The sex industry connection implies the possible involvement of organized crime. Did Thyssen do something to cross a crime boss? The financing behind the new technology is also problematic. There are big bucks involved, so who exactly is financing the studios, and what connection do they have to the increasingly popular, National Socialist political movement? And why would either big bucks financiers or the Nazi Party be involved with sex films? In addition to those thorny problems, Hoffner also has some personal issues to deal with. One of his sons is connected to the movie studio where Thyssen worked, and his other son is pro-Nazi, a bit of a problem, since Hoffner's own mother is Jewish. The plot in "Shadow and Light" is complex, all of the characters seem to have multiple motivations, and the atmosphere is gritty and bleak. A very good, noir read. |
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