27 November 2014. ISBN: 978-1-84344-547-0
Sarajevo (Bosnia) 1943. Captain Gregor Reinhardt is a military
intelligence (Abwehr) officer serving with the German army military
intelligence (the Abwehr) in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia (then one country).
Reinhardt is by training and inclination a soldier who had won the Iron Cross
(the highest German military decoration) in World War I. Subsequent to that he
became a highly effective police detective in Berlin, so much that, once Hitler
and the Nazis were in power and World War II was looming, the authorities
pressured him to join the Gestapo. Never a Nazi sympathiser and sickened by the
increasing violence and lawlessness of the regime, Reinhardt joined the Abwehr instead where his detective
skills stood him in good stead, and served in France, North Africa and,
finally, Yugoslavia. It is in Yugoslavia that he is confronted with the
brutality of the occupation in which not only the Nazis but their fascist accomplices
the Croat Ustashe were responsible and with which Reinhardt himself has been on
occasion, to his self-disgust, complicit. But when he is called upon to
investigate the murders of a fellow Abwehr officer and the Croatian film maker
Marija Vukic it is his detective skills that bring to him to realise there is
more to those deaths than a simple act of revenge. It is Marija herself who is
particularly puzzling: she was beautiful, sexually alluring and sexually
voracious but was there a purpose to her promiscuity? And if so, can Reinhardt
establish what that purpose without himself falling foul of his enemies among
the German forces and the Ustashe? Reinhardt finds himself embroiled in the
snakepit of rivalries in the Balkans while outside the city the largely
ineffective Cetniks under Mihailovic and the far more effective Partisans under
Josip Broz Tito are mounting growing resistance to the Germans and the Ustashe.
I recommend this book. The world portrayed by the
author is undoubtedly stark and brutal but then so was the reality if not more
so. Equally realistic is the virtual absence of women apart from the vampish
and manipulative (and dead) Marija. And so many of the names of the towns and
cities – Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Goradze – have resonances beyond World War II to
the Balkan wars of the 1990s which adds extra depth to the narrative. Reinhardt
himself is a complex character: not only because of his immediate problems, but
because he is still grieving for his beloved wife Carolin who died before the
war and for his son Friedrich missing presumed dead at the siege of Stalingrad.
Reinhardt had become estranged from Friedrich because of the latter's childhood
indoctrination while in the Hitler Youth with Nazi dogma but he is still
Reinhardt's son and he has has reason to believe that Friedrich's experiences
on the Eastern Front may have disillusioned him with Nazism. The author will be continuing the story of
Gregor Reinhardt in his next novel The Pale House, similarly set in
Yugoslavia during Germany's retreat and final defeat.
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Reviewer: Radmila
May
Luke McCallin Luke McCallin was born in Oxford, grew up in Africa,
was educated around the world, and has worked with the UN as a humanitarian
relief worker and peacekeeper in the Caucasus, the Sahel, and the Balkans. His
experiences have driven his writing, in which he explores what happens to
normal people put under abnormal pressures, inspiring a historical mystery
series built around an unlikely protagonist, Gregor Reinhardt, a German
intelligence officer and a former Berlin detective chased out of the police by
the Nazis. The Man From Berlin was
published in 2013, followed by a sequel, The
Pale House, in 2014.
He
lives with his wife and two children in an old farmhouse in France in the Jura
Mountains. He has a master’s degree in political science, speaks French, is
learning Spanish, and can just get by in Russian. When he’s not working or
writing or spending time with his family, he enjoys reading history, playing
squash, and keeping goal for the UN football team.
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