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Summary
Summary
A murdered revolutionary . . . A vicious serial killer . . . A city in chaos . . . All lead to Rosa. In the last days of the First World War, socialist revolution swept across Germany, sending Kaiser Wilhelm into exile and transforming Berlin into a battleground. But for Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his young assistant, Hans Fichte, the revolution is a mere inconvenience. Four women from the slums of Berlin have turned up dead, all with identical markings etched into their backs, and Hoffner and Fichte have spent the better part of six weeks trying to crack the bizarre case. Things take a troubling turn when the political police begin to show an interest in Hoffner's investigation. Hoffner has no idea why the Polpo would want to get their hands dirty with a serial murderer, until he is shown the lifeless body of Rosa Luxemburg, the same eerie markings on her back. Rumors abound that Rosa, one of the leaders of the suppressed socialist uprising, was assassinated by an angry mob, but the pattern carved into her back tells a different story. In his remarkable new thriller, Jonathan Rabb paints a vivid, unforgettable picture of a city and a people poised between the chaos of the First World War and the darkness to come, a time when political thugs, petty thieves, and charismatic leaders rushed to fill the void left behind. Into this gap steps Hoffner, who, while battling his own personal demons, is still determined to find out who is preying on the women of Berlin, even as he gets drawn deeper into the mystery surrounding Rosa's death. Hoffner's search for the killer leads him on a dark and twisted journey through the battle-scarred streets of the city, where he soon discovers that nothing is as it appears. And while he finds allies in unexpected places, he is met at every turn by men who will stop at nothing to keep him from finding out the truth about Rosa. A genuine mystery at the time, Rosa's fate has continued to prompt speculation to this day. Rabb's taut political thriller imagines one strikingly real possibility. With his first two novels,The OverseerandThe Book of Q, Rabb proved that he had a talent not only for writing suspenseful narratives but for illuminating the darkest corners of history as well. WithRosa, his finest work, he brings to life a world capital on the brink of chaos, a tragic revolutionary who both inspired and enraged, and a compellingly complex, world-weary, deeply flawed but brilliant inspector named Nikolai Hoffner. Also available as an eBook
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Based on the obscure four-month-long disappearance of the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, the "Devil Jewess" Socialist Democrat revolutionary, after her summary execution on January 15, 1919, this brooding, studiously researched fiction noir from Rabb (The Overseer; The Book of Q) imagines the maelstrom of conspiracy and political unrest in post-WWI Germany. For six dreary weeks, starting in early December, veteran Det. Insp. Nikolai Hoffner-along with Hans Fichte, an ambitious 23-year-old detective trainee-has been baffled by the corpses of middle-aged women appearing around Berlin with signature designs carved into their backs. In mid-January, Hoffner is called to see a fifth corpse in an abandoned subway station, and at the morgue, he is shown a sixth body-that of the infamous Rosa Luxemburg. Her corpse has similar markings, but there are subtle differences. These suspicious variations-coupled with the arrogant intervention of the powerful Polpo (political police), who spirit the corpse away to a morgue upstairs-launch Hoffner on a perilous, labyrinthine inquiry. Sometimes the novel's prose is rather tangled and Rabb struggles to get his story told, but subtexts of love, betrayal and a detective at war with his feelings illuminate this gothic tapestry of anti-Semitism and ethnic elitism with its foreshadowing of the Nazi era. Agent, Matt Bialer. (Mar. 1) Forecast: Fans of Philip Kerr and Alan Furst are Rabb's target audience, but his latest may disappoint them. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Rabb (author of the critically acclaimed Overseer, 1998) writes a wonderfully evocative novel about Berlin immediately after World War I. At its center is a historical mystery: Who murdered longtime revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned throughout the war, galvanized into forming the first German Communist Party after the war, and found drowned in the Landwehr Canal in 1919? In this take on what happened, Berlin Detective-Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his assistant, Hans Fichte, return after the war to their jobs and to a city ripped open by the ravages of war. They investigate four murders in the slums of Berlin: each woman has the same markings cut into their backs. When Rosa Luxemburg's corpse is discovered to have the same markings, the case turns political, with the German political police now edging in. This novel transcends the mystery genre by offering readers a glimpse into the economic and political chaos in Berlin after the war and then transcends politics by giving a pulsatingly detailed account of individual life at a particular moment in history: dress (what prostitutes wore, what police wore), food, furnishings, and street life. Casting a longtime police detective as the hero works brilliantly, since the reader shares Hoffner's shock at the changes writ large on every piece of Berlin pavement. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2004 Booklist
Guardian Review
Rosa Luxemburg, the figurehead of the failed German workers' revolution, was assassinated by rightwing militia on January 15 1919, though the body remained missing for four months until it was found floating in a canal. What happened in the intervening weeks is anyone's guess; and here is Jonathan Rabb's "novel-length conspiracy theory about serial killings and police corruption in which all roads lead to Rosa". Luxemburg's body is found to have been disfigured with a mysterious pattern of knife markings and slathered with an unguent that prevents decomposition. It is Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner's job to determine whether this is the work of a psychotic "chisel murderer" terrorising Berlin, or an elaborate plot with its roots in the anti-semitic rightwing movement developing in Bavaria. Rabb's frenzied plotting can be difficult to follow, but he has fun incorporating the celebrity figures of postwar Berlin - the director of the scientific institute is a man with "an unruly moustache and basset hound eyes" who has come up with a theory variously described as either ludicrous or genius. You don't need to be Einstein to work out who it is. Caption: article-ficpb10.1 Rosa Luxemburg, the figurehead of the failed German workers' revolution, was assassinated by rightwing militia on January 15 1919, though the body remained missing for four months until it was found floating in a canal. - Alfred Hickling.
Kirkus Review
In 1918 Berlin, the cops think they've got a serial killer on their hands until the latest victim turns out to be Rosa Luxemburg. The killer's fifth corpse has been mistreated in keeping with the established pattern, complex markings chiseled on its back. This is no ordinary corpse, however, but that of a driving force of the recently crushed socialist revolution. Suddenly, the Polpo (political police) are showing interest. Ever so politely, a territorial struggle has begun, and Kripo (criminal police) Detective Inspector Hoffner soon realizes he's being warned off. But Hoffner, as all his colleagues know, is a bulldog who investigates with a tenacity often amounting to rashness. "It's my case," he tells his wife when she tries to suggest that some warnings might be well meant. "It ends when it ends." Rosa is the obvious key. Was she the random victim of a killer whose bloodlust was up, or is someone using a madman to camouflage a conspiracy? Hoffner becomes a Luxemburg expert. He gets to know her friends, her early life, her writing. He gets to know who loved her, who hated and feared her. It's an investigation that leads him to strange places and disturbing ideas, and when the case finally ends, he must come to terms with grievous loss. As before (The Book of Q, 2001, etc.), Rabb saps the strength of a perfectly good story by taking too long to tell it. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Berlin, during the Socialist upheavals of 1919, Detective-Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his ambitious but bumbling assistant Hans Fichtse have their hands full. The bodies of several women are being discovered in excavation pits, each with an unusual pattern cut into her back. One of the bodies is that of Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary cofounder of Spartacus (later the German Communist Party). Soon complications arise, including a copycat killer, the intervention of the political police, a deranged former lace maker escaped from an asylum in Belgium, and the possible involvement of the military. Rabb (The Book of Q) spins a complex tale that is so convoluted interest wanes in the last third of the book. But his re-creation of post-World War I Berlin is masterly, and the relationship between the brilliant but flawed detective and his inexperienced assistant is absorbing. For readers who enjoy speculative history and intricate mysteries.-Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ONE 1919 Berlin in December, to those who know her, is like no other place. The first snows take on a permanence, and the wide avenues from Charlottenburg to the Rondell breathe with a crispness of Prussian winter. It is a time when little boys drag their mothers away from the well-dressed windows at KaDeWe or Wertheim's or the elegant teas at the Hotel Adlon and out to the Tiergarten and the wondrous row of marble emperors along the Siegesallee. Just as dusk settles, as the last flurries of the day swirl through the leafless trees, you can steal a glimpse of any number of little eyes peering up, hoping, just this once, to catch a stony wink from an Albrecht the Bear, or a Friedrich of Nuremberg with his large ears and dour expression. Just a wink through the snow to tell him that Christmas will be kind to him this year. "There, Mama, did you see! Do you see how he winked at me!" And the pride that next morning, bundled up beyond measure, racing out from his fine house on Belziger or Wartburg Strasse to tell his friends of his triumph. "Yes, me, too! Me, too!" Berlin in December. This, however, was January, when the snow had turned to endless drizzle, so raw that it seemed to penetrate even the heaviest of layers. And whatever civility they might still be clinging to elsewhere, here on the east side of town, all the way up to the flophouses in Prenzlauer Berg, people had little time or patience for such gestures. Christmas had brought nothing, except perhaps the truth about how the war had been lost long before the summer, how the generals had been flimflamming them all the way up to the November capitulation. Oh, and of course, the revolution. Christmas had brought that, a thoroughly German revolution, with documents in triplicate, cries from the balconies, demonstrations and parades, tea still at four o'clock, dinner at seven, and perhaps a little dancing afterward up at the White Mouse or Maxim's. Shots had been fired, naturally, a few hundred were dead, but the socialists--not the real socialists, mind you--were straightening everything up. Still, it was the weather that had most people on edge. The rain just wasn't giving in, and it was why Nikolai Hoffner, rather than waiting out on the tundral expanse of the Rosenthaler Platz, had snuck off to Rucker's bar for something warm to drink. Years of experience had told him that nothing of any significance was going to happen today: later on, he would come to regret that arrogance. So, with a knowing smile, he had left the ever-eager Hans Fichte up on the square; at the first sign of trouble, Fichte knew where to find him. Hoffner sat with a brandy ("I'd walk a mile for Mampe's brandy, it makes you feel so hale and dandy!"), the early edition of the BZ am Mittag in front of him. He had not sat like this in weeks, a quiet read to clear the mind. And not because of the nonsense that had been going on out at the stables, or up at the Reichstag: all the pretty uniformed men had managed to disrupt traffic too many times, now, to recount. No, Hoffner had been up to his ears in real violence, genuine terror, hardly the kind plotted in Red pamphlets or designed in back rooms by overfed burghers calling themselves socialists. They played at revolution; he knew another kind. But for today--orders from on high--he was told to leave that alone and join the rest of his breed in the streets to make sure "nothing untoward" would come to pass. Hoffner finished off the last of his drink and nodded to the barman to bring him another. As he was one of only three people in the place--a man at a corner table, his head tilted back against the wall, his mouth gaped open in sleep; a woman with a beer and bread, her business at one of the nearby hotels temporarily interrupted--the service was unusually prompt. The barman approached with the bottle. "This, I'm sad to say, will have to be the last." Hoffner looked up from his paper. "I'm sad to hear." He had a steady, reassuring voice. "It's this damned rationing," said the man. "This and another bottle's all I've got for the day. My apologies." Hoffner half smiled. "What do you care if the money's coming from me or from someone else?" "Simple economics, mein Herr. No brandy, fewer people in here to buy my sausages before they rot." The man opened the bottle. "It's called the distribution of capital, or something like that. You understand." Hoffner's smile grew. "Completely." "And"--the man nodded as he poured--"the money's not coming from you. It never does. So why don't you be nice to me today and let someone else pay for the brandy?" Hoffner reached into his coat pocket and produced a ten-pfennig coin. He placed it on the table. The man smiled again as he shook his head. "No, no. I like that you don't pay. You like that you don't pay. We may be governed by socialists now, but it's better that you hold on to your money." The man popped the cork back into the bottle and headed for the bar. "Time to wake up, Herr Professor Doktor," he said as he moved past the man in the corner. The man at once opened his eyes, looked around in a daze, and then, in one fluid movement, pawed out his beard, picked up his umbrella, and stood. Upright, he seemed far more impressive, though from the look of his clothes, one had to wonder how much sleep he had gotten in the last few days. He peered over at Hoffner. "Is it safe out there, mein Herr?" Hoffner continued to read his paper. "Safe as can be, Herr Professor Doktor." "Excellent." The man turned to the barman. "My thanks, Herr Ober." And, placing his hat on his head, he started for the door, stopping momentarily to bow to the lady. "Madame." He then glanced quickly through the windows, and was gone. Hoffner scanned through several stories, all of which were doing their best to assuage a devoted readership. The Reds were dead: good old Liebknecht had gotten his in the park, little Rosa in the clutches of a murderous mob, though her body was still missing; Chancellor Ebert could be trusted with the government; business was on the rise, so forth and so on. And yet, even within the lines meant to pacify, the BZ had that remarkable capacity to stir up a kind of subdued panic: Reichs Chancellor Ebert, with the full cooperation of a diligent military, has declared the streets once again safe for the men and women of Berlin. Hurrah! With the National Assembly election only days away, we must thank this provisional government for the speed with which it has put down the Bolshevik-inspired insurgency, and hope that it is equally tireless in its efforts to hunt down the deluded lone sharpshooters who still infest our city. Those living in the area between Linienstrasse and the Hackescher-Markt are advised to remain indoors for the next twenty-four hours. The woman at the table laughed lazily to herself. Still pretty at twenty-two, twenty-three, she jawed through her bread. She was wearing the unspoken uniform of those girls who sell roses and matches at the restaurants along Friedrichstrasse--the silk-thin dress, ruffles along the low collar and cuffs, the dark cloche hat with its front trim tucked up, just so--except hers was well past its prime, the sure indication that she, too, had progressed. All pretense long gone, she spoke her mind. "It's so easy to spot one of you," she said, not looking up. "Long brown coat, brown shoes, brown hat, brown, brown, brown." Hoffner flipped to the next page. "One might say the same of you, Fraulein." She bit into a wedge of bread. "But you won't. As a gentleman." "No, of course not. As a gentleman." The woman started to laugh again as she picked at the remaining slab of bread, her fingers like little bird beaks pecking at the crust. "Another glass of brandy for my friend, Herr Ober," she said, her eyes fixed on the bread. "We must make sure to keep our men of the Kripo warm and happy. Who will protect us from the Russian hordes?" Another laugh. Hoffner folded his paper and placed it on the table. "Alas, Fraulein, but the Russians are out of the Kriminalpolizei's jurisdiction. We deal only with the Berlin hordes." The man at the bar smiled quietly and retrieved the bottle, but Hoffner shook his head and pushed back his chair, a bit farther than he had anticipated needing. His wife was pleased that he was having no trouble keeping the weight on, a testament to her culinary skills amid all the shortages. Not that he was fat, but Hoffner had a certain image of himself that he was, as yet, unwilling to part with: good height, deep eyes, dark hair (he had gotten the latter two from his Russian mother, likewise the first name), reasonably fit, and with a thin scar just beneath the chin, a worthy reminder of championship days as a Gymnasium fencer. At forty-five, however, several centimeters had vanished to the slight roll in his shoulders; the depth of his eyes had relocated south to a pair of ever-widening bags; and while the hair was still full, dark most certainly would have been a stretch. As to the rest, more like distant friends than close companions. "Thank you, Fraulein," said Hoffner. "But I'm guessing you've got better things to do with your hard-earned money." The front door opened and a pocket of chilled air quickly made the rounds. There, slick from the rain and out of breath, stood Hans Fichte, his eyes on Hoffner. "Shut that door," barked the barman as he placed the bottle back on its shelf. Fichte did as he was told, and moved quickly to Hoffner's table. "You're needed back in the square, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. It's--" He glanced around, then leaned farther in over the table. "It's important we get back." Fichte spoke as if he actually thought someone other than Hoffner might have any interest in what he was saying. Fichte was a large man, over two meters tall, and with wide, thick shoulders. A strip of flaxen hair, matted in sweat and rain, held to the top of his brow, and his usually gray/white cheeks were blistered in odd blotches of red. A single drop--let it be perspiration--clung to the tip of his nose, which was too long for his narrow face, and which always gave him a look of mild disdain. At twenty-three, Fichte still had a boyish smoothness to his complexion, though the ordeal of the last six weeks was beginning to dig out some distinguishing lines: hardly what one would call character, but it was something. The fact that Fichte had reached twenty-three--uncrippled and completely unconnected with any of the convalescence asylums that had recently surfaced throughout the city and the Reich--made him something of an anomaly. Fichte had been fit enough to serve his Kaiser in 1914, or at least up through the second week of September 1914, when, in a moment of profound stupidity, he had volunteered during a drill to demonstrate how to use one of the early gas masks, those chemically treated masks that required wetting with a special activating agent immediately prior to use. Hans had not known about the need for the wetting. The gas had come on, he had inhaled, and from that moment on, he had ceased to be fit enough to serve his Kaiser. Damaged lungs, however, were just fine for the Schutzmannschaft (municipal beat cops), and after three years of stellar duty, Fichte had applied and won transfer to the Kripo. He had been presented to Hoffner two and half months ago as his Kriminal-Assistent (detective in training), a replacement for a partner of twelve years who had volunteered and then gone missing in 1915. Victor Konig had come as close to a friend as Hoffner had permitted, and his death had taken some time to get over. With the choices on the home front greatly diminished, the Kriminaldirektor (KD) had been kind enough to let Hoffner work alone for the better part of four years. Hans Fichte was now the price for that kindness. "So important," Hoffner said as he got to his feet, "that you've decided to leave the square yourself?" He was waiting for a response. "In the future, Hans, find a boy--there's always one roaming about--and send him to get me. Yes?" Fichte thought for a moment, a mental note etched across his face. When it was properly filed, he nodded, and then headed for the door. Hoffner followed, stopping as he reached the bar. "One more for my friend," he said. He pushed a coin along the uneven surface, then turned to the young woman's table and placed several more in a neat stack next to her glass. She continued to stare at her bread. "It'll cost you a lot more than that, Herr Detective," she said. Hoffner slowly pulled his hand away. "No--I think umbrellas go for about that much in this weather, Fraulein." She looked up. A kind, if sparing, smile curled her lips. Hoffner turned back to the bar to find two small glasses filled with brandy. "Come on, Fichte. It'll do you good. Whatever's up on the square can wait while you get a bit of warming-up." Fichte hesitated, then strode to the bar and downed the brandy in one swift movement. He stood there, awaiting his next assignment. Hoffner did his best to ignore the deferential stare as he sniffed at the liquid and then tossed it back. He placed the glass on the bar. "You're welcome, Fichte." Another moment to consider. "Oh . . . yes. Thank you, Herr Komm . . . Hoffner." "And to you as well, Herr Economics." Hoffner tipped his hat to the young lady and motioned Fichte to the door. Together they stepped out into the street. The brandy, as it turned out, was no match for the city's infamous Berliner Luft, a smack of frigid air just the thing to set Hoffner's eyes tearing. He turned up his coat collar and pulled his hat down to his face. His wife had insisted he take a scarf, but he had left it back at the office: Martha would find a certain pleasure in that later tonight. Hoffner noticed Fichte was sporting a nice thick woolen muffler. And who's been taking care of him, Hoffner wondered. Excerpted from Rosa: A Novel by Jonathan Rabb All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.