Editorial Content for Some Murders in Berlin

One of the hardest jobs of an editor is to take what an author has written, tens of thousands of words, and compress it into the copy that goes on the inner fold of the dust jacket in such a way that the average consumer will have a good understanding of what the book is about. The description for Karen Robards' new thriller starts off with three words: September 1943: Berlin.

Well, you know, either you’re susceptible to that or you’re not. SOME MURDERS IN BERLIN gives us a Danish forensic psychiatrist, Elin Lund, who carries the rather dire nickname of “Dr. Murder.” She has been forcibly dragooned from occupied Denmark to assist in the capture of a particularly brutal serial killer --- a madman in a mad city, populated by sinister Nazi goons. Her assigned partner is a battle-scarred veteran of the Eastern Front, skeptical of her abilities and determined to keep the harsh realities and dark secrets of the German capital from her.

"[I]f you’re looking for an atmospheric WWII murder investigation novel, this book is a splendid read... Quantity has a quality all its own, and what we have here is well written, gripping and ultimately satisfying."

There is a lot more going on in the pages than just that, but if you’re looking for an atmospheric WWII murder investigation novel, this book is a splendid read --- complete with a fearless heroine, a square-jawed detective, risqué underground clubs, air-raid sirens, and the threat of the Gestapo lurking around every corner.

In terms of the spine-chilling nature of the subject matter and its historical treatment of the role of forensic psychology, SOME MURDERS IN BERLIN is somewhat reminiscent of Caleb Carr’s THE ALIENIST, which features a psychologist fighting crime in turn-of-the-century New York. But if it looks like a streamlined work of historical detective fiction at first, the novel starts skidding towards melodramatic complexity and ends up lurching into the territory of the thoroughly baroque.

While some of the abundant plot twists are predictable (there is a fair amount of romantic tension between the two leads, and it goes exactly in the direction that you think it will), others are so messy and complicated that they result in making the closing chapters more jumbled than they need to be.

What elevates the novel is the hard work that Karen Robards has done with the historical background. Berlin in 1943 is difficult terrain to work with, and she does not take the cheap way out by just treating the city as a dangerous black-and-white backdrop to evil. Wartime Berlin is, in its way, perhaps the book's most crucial character, and Robards imbues its tree-lined boulevards and claustrophobic underground passages with its own dark and menacing personality.

It's important to review books as they are, not what the reviewer would want them to be. There is a lot going on in SOME MURDERS IN BERLIN, far more than might well be reasonable. But if the novel ends up spinning too many plates, at least they’re good bone china. Quantity has a quality all its own, and what we have here is well written, gripping and ultimately satisfying.