View Single Post
Old 04-03-2017, 05:32 PM   #25663
ATDrake
Wizzard
ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 11,517
Karma: 33048258
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Roundworld
Device: Kindle 2 International, Sony PRS-T1, BlackBerry PlayBook, Acer Iconia
Finished Liar Moon by Ben Pastor, 2nd in her Martin Bora, Conscientious WWII Wehrmacht Officer With An Increasingly Troubled Conscience series of sleuth stories set in assorted Nazi-occupied countries. This one has a time skip to 1943 in Northern Italy, where the case involves investigating the suspicious murder of a wealthy fascist supporter civilian who has no lack of local suspects with much motivation beyond the political, in between his regular duties hunting resistance partisans (and deniably helping prisoners escape, maybe).

Apparently these are written out of chronological order, up and down Bora's timeline, and make references to personal events that got written years down the line in later books (mostly the ones not available in English, unfortunately). Which does give it a greater sense of fleshed-outness, and the sense that the author has his entire life story planned out and isn't just making it all up as she goes along (though that would also be perfectly okay if it were convincingly done). Though I do wonder if the real life German officer Bora is based upon suffered exactly that same serious war injury (but not enough to go look up his Wikipedia entry just yet, in case of spoilers if their lives mirror that closely).

Anyway, this had more of a feel of a conventional police procedural story than the 1st book, pairing Bora with a local Italian police investigator of non-fascist sympathies, which provides for a nice contrast, showing how he's viewed by the outside world even as he struggles with his internal dilemmas. I liked this one, and have started the next, which is another Italian episode, moving south to Rome.
ATDrake is offline   Reply With Quote