Reviews for Straight into Darkness

The average rating for Straight into Darkness based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-06 00:00:00 Brian Hampton This book turned out to be different from FK's usual Decker&Lazarus series (which I'm kind of addicted to). Very different. She has definitely done her research for this book. But I don't think she likes Germans at all: each and every person described in this book seems to be with poor morales and with really big flaws. All German men (and Axel Berg, the protagonist police officer, who turns out to be Danish) frequent prostitutes (with a loveless marriage, and a nagging wife, who can blame them?), everyone gives or takes bribes for anything, and there is a rant about how Jews are horrible every two pages. (Berg doesn't think so, and her lady lover happens to be a Jewess, but enough is enough. I have many German friends, none as lowlife as the people of this book, and I can't imagine there having been THAT much Jew-bashing than here even in 1930s. There's as much of that bashing here as there are examples of the word "like" in Facebook.) There are a few things I would correct here. First, someone was described as 6'2" tall. But a German would describe the person as 1.84 m or 184 cm. Later there was a baby that was 4 kg, so if you do use kgs in the book, there's no reason to stick to the imperial measurements for lenghts. There was also a word that doesn't belong in Europe: Streetcar. In Germany or anywhere in Europe those are and were called trams. A German wouldn't even know what a Streetcar is, unless they were once an exchange student in US. The streetcar should be tram. Thore are all rather small points, but they make a huge difference for the authenticity (I didn't fully follow with the first vs third person dialog, but I'd also expect there would be a few cases of those where a German wouldn't have used the first vs third person the same way). Having Hitler do his appearance in this book was then too much. But I think it's way more the disgustingness of all the characters that prevented me from fully enjoying this one than those little details. (I think I'll stick to her Decker series in the future).

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-31 00:00:00 Emmanuelle Oppeneau I just finished reading this this morning. Wow. I've read everything else Faye Kellerman and wasn't sure I was in the mood for something dark and heavy. But I wanted to know what happened to Rina's grandmother in Munich, and since she decided not to fully find out the answer... I had to go ahead and read! I'm do glad I did! What an amazing story of the times, the hatred political climate in pre-WWII Germany.. And insight into how people were feeling about Hitler before he was elected and caused so much terror and shame for the world. Kellerman did a fabulous job with the story... And I feel as though I learned so much also! great read.