gulshanbatra's review against another edition
4.0
I picked up this book, based on a recco I read somewhere of another of DF's books (Safe Houses). I couldn't get that one so decided to try this one instead.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the book. It has pleasantly tight story-telling, an impressively convoluted yet a fathomable plot, a fairly deep characterization of some its key characters - though not all, and this last reason is why, IMHO, the book falls short of a glowing 5-star feedback.
The character of Kurt Bauer is perhaps the most deeply explored, though later on, Gordon gets his space. However, both have a lot of depth in the past tense - in the present, Gordon is an enigma, never really explained and Kurt is curiously kept largely in the shadows. There's hardly ever any doubt about the hand behind the curtain for all that happens to Nat in the story, but perhaps a little more present-tense space to Kurt may have helped identify the reader with Kurt. Or, maybe that was never the intent. Berta's character is shown as the most driven - next only to Kurt, yet has very little backstory - again clearly by design as a tease to the reader. It is only in the very last chapter that we find out what really has been driving Berta all this time.
Which brings me to the most impressive part of the book.
The plot.
The way the story unfolds is really brilliant, and I'm still surprised thinking back to how the author was able to spin all those pages, while packing the surprises that he does in the last 10% of the book. And they are big ones. Turn everything on its head, and then some. While it brings the story to a neat conclusion, it takes a little too much of credulity to believe how everything could fit in and be concluded so neatly by someone so obviously inexperienced as Nat. He may be a good History Professor, but he is a clumsy investigator, and I still can't understand why the law enforcement agencies gave him the leeway and support that they end up giving.
Excepting for those rather secondary gripes, the book is a very good read, and while the plot is nowhere close some of the best Reacher or Bosch or even Virgil Flowers puzzles, it has its delights. Most interesting is how slowly the layers of the story are discovered and revealed by Nat's character, and how one thing leads him to the next.
That was most satisfying.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the book. It has pleasantly tight story-telling, an impressively convoluted yet a fathomable plot, a fairly deep characterization of some its key characters - though not all, and this last reason is why, IMHO, the book falls short of a glowing 5-star feedback.
The character of Kurt Bauer is perhaps the most deeply explored, though later on, Gordon gets his space. However, both have a lot of depth in the past tense - in the present, Gordon is an enigma, never really explained and Kurt is curiously kept largely in the shadows. There's hardly ever any doubt about the hand behind the curtain for all that happens to Nat in the story, but perhaps a little more present-tense space to Kurt may have helped identify the reader with Kurt. Or, maybe that was never the intent. Berta's character is shown as the most driven - next only to Kurt, yet has very little backstory - again clearly by design as a tease to the reader. It is only in the very last chapter that we find out what really has been driving Berta all this time.
Which brings me to the most impressive part of the book.
The plot.
The way the story unfolds is really brilliant, and I'm still surprised thinking back to how the author was able to spin all those pages, while packing the surprises that he does in the last 10% of the book. And they are big ones. Turn everything on its head, and then some. While it brings the story to a neat conclusion, it takes a little too much of credulity to believe how everything could fit in and be concluded so neatly by someone so obviously inexperienced as Nat. He may be a good History Professor, but he is a clumsy investigator, and I still can't understand why the law enforcement agencies gave him the leeway and support that they end up giving.
Excepting for those rather secondary gripes, the book is a very good read, and while the plot is nowhere close some of the best Reacher or Bosch or even Virgil Flowers puzzles, it has its delights. Most interesting is how slowly the layers of the story are discovered and revealed by Nat's character, and how one thing leads him to the next.
That was most satisfying.
speesh's review against another edition
4.0
Spies and the second world war. Who doesn't love stories about one or the other?
Spies in the Second World War? Getting better.
Spies today and spies in the Second World War - Now that's a match made in some sort of secret (service) heaven for me.
So 'The Arms Maker of Berlin' had ticked all my right boxes even before I began reading it. And I wasn't disappointed when I finished. Actually, I was disappointed, but only that I had finished it.
What's it about? Hard to pin down without writing a review nearly as long as the book itself, really. Events in Nazi Germany in the closing months of the Second World War, love and betrayal - on many levels - the ripples this causes through the various protagonist's lives through the intervening, post-war partition of Germany, to re-unification and into today's international espionage world.
I found the book really quite moving and genuinely thought-provoking. Yes, there are spies; war-time spies, cold-war spies, the start of the CIA, the Stasi in East Germany and the current international espionage wars of today. It is also about a much more intimate picture of love and emotion and what the emotions caused by love, made people do when under almost unimaginable pressures, like the Second World War. People finding that love and war makes it almost impossible for them to do right, for doing wrong. And about how the effects of World War II, still reach out to today; the emotional 'ripples' from that period, are still being felt.
The book's timeline moves back and forth between the early 1940's and the present day and you will have to pay attention. But it then pays dividends as the story develops and secrets, motives and why people did what they did, gradually become clear.
As I say, I thoroughly enjoyed this one and whilst the cover comment about Dan Fesperman being the new John le Carré, is inappropriately wide of the mark, this is nonetheless one of the best novels I've read in a long time.
Spies in the Second World War? Getting better.
Spies today and spies in the Second World War - Now that's a match made in some sort of secret (service) heaven for me.
So 'The Arms Maker of Berlin' had ticked all my right boxes even before I began reading it. And I wasn't disappointed when I finished. Actually, I was disappointed, but only that I had finished it.
What's it about? Hard to pin down without writing a review nearly as long as the book itself, really. Events in Nazi Germany in the closing months of the Second World War, love and betrayal - on many levels - the ripples this causes through the various protagonist's lives through the intervening, post-war partition of Germany, to re-unification and into today's international espionage world.
I found the book really quite moving and genuinely thought-provoking. Yes, there are spies; war-time spies, cold-war spies, the start of the CIA, the Stasi in East Germany and the current international espionage wars of today. It is also about a much more intimate picture of love and emotion and what the emotions caused by love, made people do when under almost unimaginable pressures, like the Second World War. People finding that love and war makes it almost impossible for them to do right, for doing wrong. And about how the effects of World War II, still reach out to today; the emotional 'ripples' from that period, are still being felt.
The book's timeline moves back and forth between the early 1940's and the present day and you will have to pay attention. But it then pays dividends as the story develops and secrets, motives and why people did what they did, gradually become clear.
As I say, I thoroughly enjoyed this one and whilst the cover comment about Dan Fesperman being the new John le Carré, is inappropriately wide of the mark, this is nonetheless one of the best novels I've read in a long time.
chriswolak's review
4.0
A real page turner for me. Recommend it to those who like WWII and Cold War era spy novels. This one bounces back-and-forth between the 1940s and "today" in Bern, Berlin, and the U.S. Our hero is Nat Turnbull, a History professor who gets mixed up in a high-stakes mystery that just exploded around his mentor. FBI agents, a beautiful history professor who grew up in Communist East Germany, Iranians, resistance fighters and old Nazis round out the cast. Fesperman brings to life the horrors of living in a society where you can trust no one, not even those you love. He doesn't seem to have an axe to grind and doesn't 'moralize.' The result is a book that has left me with a lot to think about it...it is a story that will stay on my mind long after I've read the last page.
rosseroo's review
3.0
"Workmanlike" is probably the adjective that best fits this thriller, which hopscotches back and forth between the present and WWII. The story is appropriately convoluted for the genre, involving a naive anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin, the impending collapse of the Third Reich, OSS activities in Switzerland, and how all these connect to the present. And rest assured they do -- as Dr. Nat Turnbull, a semi-distinguished professor of modern German history at a small liberal-arts college, discovers when he is hired to track down some old OSS files hidden by his mentor at the college.
Turnbull (like pretty much every character in the book) is a stock figure, he's the anonymous academic who gets sucked into a great intrigue with national security implications (paging Dr. Jones, Dr. Indiana Jones to the front please, your country needs you to fight Nazis). It seems these old missing files have something to do with present-day nuclear weapons proliferation, and since the FBI apparently doesn't have the expertise to find them, they enlist Dr. Turnbull. This is a pretty flimsy way of setting up a kind of "everyman" protagonist, and it only continues to be unconvincing as the story moves along. But you just have to accept the premise and move on if you want to have any hope of enjoying the book.
What follows is a treasure hunt that takes Dr. Turnbull all over the place, from Baltimore to the National Archives outside Washington, to Florida, Switzerland, various parts of Germany, and so on. Tagging along with him for parts of this quest is his unreliable ally, a mysterious German academic with her own agenda. Meanwhile, alternating chapters take us back to wartime Germany and the relationships among members of a feeble resistance cell. The historically-set material is much more interesting than the contemporary chapters, as we get a real sense of how certain parts of German society were trying to position themselves for the inevitable Allied victory. Alas, the characters of both eras are types rather than people, and there is plenty of quite creaky dialogue throughout.
The story is full of twists and turns and deceit, all of which work perfectly well but somehow feel rather formulaic. You could spend your whole life reading nothing but thrillers revolving around Nazi Germany, so it takes a lot to stand out. (For example, this book has little of the detail that bring Philip Kerr's [b:Berlin Noir |236814|Berlin Noir March Violets; The Pale Criminal; A German Requiem|Philip Kerr|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255744595s/236814.jpg|229374] trilogy to vivid life, nor do they have the striking atmosphere of Alan Furst's excellent spy novels). The book tries gamely to provide that big twist at the end that readers expect from thrillers, unfortunately I saw it coming a mile away (in the first third of the book I had a pretty good idea that an assumption had been made regarding a certain character that would be revealed at the very end to be untrue, and I was right). In the end, I can't say I'm glad I read it, but neither can I say it's not worth reading. It's a serviceable thriller that passes the time pleasantly enough, as long you keep your expectations lowish.
Turnbull (like pretty much every character in the book) is a stock figure, he's the anonymous academic who gets sucked into a great intrigue with national security implications (paging Dr. Jones, Dr. Indiana Jones to the front please, your country needs you to fight Nazis). It seems these old missing files have something to do with present-day nuclear weapons proliferation, and since the FBI apparently doesn't have the expertise to find them, they enlist Dr. Turnbull. This is a pretty flimsy way of setting up a kind of "everyman" protagonist, and it only continues to be unconvincing as the story moves along. But you just have to accept the premise and move on if you want to have any hope of enjoying the book.
What follows is a treasure hunt that takes Dr. Turnbull all over the place, from Baltimore to the National Archives outside Washington, to Florida, Switzerland, various parts of Germany, and so on. Tagging along with him for parts of this quest is his unreliable ally, a mysterious German academic with her own agenda. Meanwhile, alternating chapters take us back to wartime Germany and the relationships among members of a feeble resistance cell. The historically-set material is much more interesting than the contemporary chapters, as we get a real sense of how certain parts of German society were trying to position themselves for the inevitable Allied victory. Alas, the characters of both eras are types rather than people, and there is plenty of quite creaky dialogue throughout.
The story is full of twists and turns and deceit, all of which work perfectly well but somehow feel rather formulaic. You could spend your whole life reading nothing but thrillers revolving around Nazi Germany, so it takes a lot to stand out. (For example, this book has little of the detail that bring Philip Kerr's [b:Berlin Noir |236814|Berlin Noir March Violets; The Pale Criminal; A German Requiem|Philip Kerr|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255744595s/236814.jpg|229374] trilogy to vivid life, nor do they have the striking atmosphere of Alan Furst's excellent spy novels). The book tries gamely to provide that big twist at the end that readers expect from thrillers, unfortunately I saw it coming a mile away (in the first third of the book I had a pretty good idea that an assumption had been made regarding a certain character that would be revealed at the very end to be untrue, and I was right). In the end, I can't say I'm glad I read it, but neither can I say it's not worth reading. It's a serviceable thriller that passes the time pleasantly enough, as long you keep your expectations lowish.
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