The Beginning (Berlin Gothic) by Jonas Winner

First published in Germany in 2011; published in translation by AmazonCrossing on August 27, 2013

Berlin Gothic was released as a seven-part serial in Germany. In translation, it has been divided into two parts, of which The Beginning is the first.

For reasons that are initially murky, young Till Anschütz runs away from a mysterious place called Brackenfelde. A car driven by Julia Bentheim strikes him, but Till resists being taken to a hospital for fear that he'll be returned to Brackenfelde. Julia takes him home, where Till meets her son Max and daughters Lisa and Claire. Max lives in fear of his inability to meet the expectations of Xavier, his domineering father, a writer whose books are so horrifying he can't talk about them with his children. In some unspecified way, Xavier is in the clutches of his wealthy new publisher, Felix von Quitzow.

A dozen years later, a dying woman is found in a pit at a construction site, the victim of an apparent crime. Konstantin Butz investigates. While Butz is exploring a shaft in the pit, he thinks he sees ... something ... before the walls collapse, burying him beneath the muddy earth.

The two timelines are linked by Claire, who has become Butz' girlfriend. Yet Claire is a conflicted woman, inexplicably drawn to a boxer named Frederik, who seems obsessed with her.

Where will the story go? I haven't a clue, which makes The Beginning interesting but difficult to review. Maybe it will go nowhere. Maybe it will be great. What I can say about The Beginning is that it's a good beginning. Jonas Winner generates genuine tension, a sense of foreboding that pervades both plot threads. He creates a strong atmosphere of creepiness and he writes fast-moving, minimalist prose. If nothing else, The Beginning makes me look forward to the ending.

RECOMMENDED

Bones of the Lost by Kathy Reichs

Published by Scribner on August 27, 2013

Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who becomes curious about the hit-and-run death of an unidentified teenage girl. Although the case does not require the services of a forensic anthropologist, Brennan is certain that she's more capable of solving it than the assigned homicide detective. Remarkably, the detective takes her along as he investigates, even letting her interview a witness while he sits in the car and broods. In the real world, no homicide detective would tolerate Brennan's condescending attitude or her meddling, much less follow her around like a puppy while she does all the work. Nor would he bring her along while executing a search warrant at a potentially dangerous location -- dressing her in Kevlar, no less -- particularly when he has no reason to believe the search will uncover evidence that requires inspection by a forensic anthropologist.

Even more improbable is a subplot that sends Brennan to Afghanistan, where she is tasked with determining whether a soldier shot a villager in the back a year earlier by examining the villager's skeletal remains. Brennan's daughter happens to be in the military, serving in Afghanistan. This happy circumstance allows Brennan to go shopping with her daughter in a bazaar while dodging mortar rounds. The trip to Afghanistan eventually ties into the primary plot in a way that requires the reader to swallow a series of extraordinary coincidences. I didn't. The Afghanistan interlude is utterly predictable, completely unbelievable, and much of it comes across as filler designed to pad a thin story.

On the plus side, Kathy Reichs writes the kind of clever prose that encourages readers to set aside reservations about the story and characters. Fortunately for the reader, a good bit of medical jargon is translated into simple English, but it's unlikely that the seasoned detective who demands the translation would actually need it. What homicide detective doesn't know the meaning of "lividity"?

Unless you count an unfailing sense of superiority as a personality, Brennan has none. She's a one-note character and the note is irritating. The other characters are bland and boring. Brennan has a stereotypically shallow ex-husband. That relationship, and another failed relationship, like her scattered sister and her daughter in Afghanistan, are presumably meant to add human interest. They are of no interest at all. Brennan's "passion" for issues like "justice for the dead" (as if the dead care), and her frequent climbs onto soapboxes to tell us just how passionate she is (she often feels like screaming at people who care less than she does because she cares sooooo much), come across as narcissistic posturing.

Once Brennan returns from Afghanistan and refocuses on the murdered girl, the story follows a mundane, overused plot, taking a couple of obvious twists before racing to an eye-rolling ending. Despite receiving a series of graphic warnings telling her to mind her own business, Brennan goes charging into danger at midnight, pausing only to leave a voicemail for the detective assigned to the case (but inexplicably forgetting to take her phone with her), when any sane person would have called 911 and left the risky work to people who carry guns. Reichs understands the mechanics of thriller writing, as demonstrated by her snappy (although sometimes overwrought) prose style, but the novel's brighter moments are overshadowed by the story's silliness.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Days in the History of Silence by Merethe Lindstrøm

First published in Norway in 2011.  Published in translation by Other Press on August 27, 2013.

Days in the History of Silence is an unflinching examination of a woman's colorless, regret-filled life, her adoption or acceptance of shared solitude as a shield against pain. As she tells her story, it becomes apparent that the shield is a poor barrier. Other choices might serve her better, but ingrained habits are difficult to unlearn.

Eva has retired from her job as a high school teacher of Norwegian. Her husband Simon is surrendering to a form of dementia characterized by a disturbing silence. "It is not the feeling that he is no longer there," Eva thinks. "It is the feeling that you are not either." Eva has always been afraid that Simon would one day disappear; now she wonders if this is Simon's way of doing just that. Years earlier, Simon suffered from depression, a byproduct of surviving the war as a child by hiding in a concealed room (a time when silence protected him from discovery) and of bearing the guilt of his survival when so many of his friends and family "were crossed out of history." Now he goes days before articulating a random word, as if he is challenging Eva to find its meaning, perhaps to explain to him the meaning of his life.

If Eva is not as deeply depressed as Simon was, she is at least full of woe. She tells us about unsettling childhood and marital experiences. She thinks about the son she gave away. She makes gloomy observations of the life that surrounds her. Although she believes herself to be different from her husband, the reader comes to question the accuracy of that belief. Eva thinks she talks "all the time," but as her daughter points out, she never reveals her thoughts. She might be loquacious but she is isolated, even from her children.

The novel's central conflict arises from Eva's need to decide whether to place Simon in a home for the elderly, to "give him away" as she gave away her son. Eva is clearly capable of acting as Simon's caretaker, but she thinks "our solidarity has something suspect about it now." As the novel unfolds, a secondary conflict develops as Eva tells us about Marija, the undocumented Latvian they hired to help with household chores, a woman whose companionship substituted for friendship in Eva's friendless life. The decision to fire Marija after three years of employment, and the anger it instilled in her three daughters, weighs heavily on Eva's mind. Eva refuses to explain the decision to her daughters, and while that refusal seems inexplicable to the reader, it is consistent with Eva's inability to reveal herself to them.

The reason for Marija's termination goes unexplained until near the novel's end. Given the buildup and the event's centrality to the story, Merethe Lindstrøm must have intended the explanation to have more force than it delivers. Still, this is a novel of striking images and metaphors, particularly Eva's memory of a young intruder who, despite Eva's perception of a threat, may have only been "seeking refuge" or "searching for someone, or something" -- just as Eva and Simon have spent (or wasted) their lives doing. Some moments in the story are exceptionally poignant (as when Eva checks her husband for a pulse even though she can see him breathing). Yet there is no balance here, no spark of happiness or hope to offset the unremitting melancholy, and while some lives are like that, reading about them can be an emotionally oppressive (albeit intellectually rewarding) chore. For that reason Days in the History of Silence is a novel I admire rather than love, but there is much here to admire.

RECOMMENDED

Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr

First published in the UK in 2011; published in the US in hardcover by Marian Wood/Putnam in 2012 and in paperback by Penguin in 2013

Noir is dark by definition, but Bernie Gunther is at his gloomiest in Prague Fatale. He's coping with the ugly events that marked him in earlier novels. It is 1941 and Bernie is back in Berlin. After harrowing experiences in Belorussia, feeling that he is merely "a blur" of the man he once was, Bernie entertains thoughts of suicide. When he looks at the mangled body of a man hit by a train, he sees himself. He is inspired to live only by the knowledge that so many Jews with so much less have soldiered on.

The mangled body is that of Geert Vranken, who came to Germany from Holland in search of employment. That his death was neither an accident nor suicide is clear from the multiple stab wounds that cover his torso. Bernie makes little progress in the death investigation until he saves a beautiful woman named Arianne Tauber from a mugging. Arianne eventually tells Bernie an intriguing story about an envelope she was hired to deliver that has now gone missing. The information causes Bernie to investigate the death of a Czech spy before he is summoned to Prague by General Heydrich, in whose pocket Bernie unwillingly resides. At that point Prague Fatale turns into a locked room murder mystery, giving Bernie a chance to exercise his considerable detective skills.

Because Prague Fatale is a murder mystery linked with a spy mystery, the plot is even more intricate than is common in the Bernie Gunther novels. The mystery's resolution isn't entirely unexpected but the setup is clever. A plot twist at the end is too often foreshadowed to be truly surprising, but it is nonetheless satisfying. A final twist seemed to be tacked on as an afterthought. The Nazi intolerance of (and hypocrisy toward) homosexuality is one of the novel's better themes, given that gay men are among the forgotten victims of Nazi tyranny.

By now, Bernie Gunther fans are so used to the character that his understandably bitter complaints about his life are taking on a broken record quality. He gives voice to his fears of what the Nazis are doing to him, and to Germany, so often that it becomes a numbing mantra. Prague Fatale would have been a tighter novel without the frequent repetition of Bernie's angst. Still, that's a relatively minor quibble. Bernie Gunther is who he is (as he often tells us), and that's what makes these novels so absorbing.

RECOMMENDED

Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani

Published by Atria Books on June 18, 2013

Children of the Jacaranda Tree spotlights characters who endure serious hardships in Iran as the direct or indirect victims of political oppression. The novel begins in 1983 with Azar, who is being transported from a prison in Tehran to a hospital where, with little assistance, she gives birth to Neda. The weeks that follow childbirth reveal the misery of caring for a baby in an uncaring environment and highlight a mother's fear of separation from her child.

As the novel jumps around in time, covering a period from 1983 to 2011, we meet other victims and survivors of tyranny. The time span gives Neda a chance to grow up and, not surprisingly, she reappears near the end of the novel. Neda has heard tales of horror recounted by her mother, relatives, and political refugees, and she seems destined (as is likely true of Sahar Delijani, who was born in the same Tehran prison as Neda) to become a bearer of their stories.

The changing time frames and characters give rise to one of the novel's central weaknesses. Character development suffers, and it becomes difficult to make a connection with the characters, because they are introduced, usually under traumatic circumstances, and then disappear as the story shifts to someone else. Their stories do not interconnect as seamlessly as they should. We learn a good bit about the brutality the characters witnessed or endured but we learn too little about the characters themselves.

Delijani's writing style is not as powerful as her subject matter. Compelling scenes are not matched by compelling prose. She strives for a literary flair that she doesn't quite attain. Some of her well-intentioned sentences come across as trite or heavy-handed. Other sentences belong in a cheesy romance novel. The picture she paints of life in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution -- the oppression of women, fear of the Revolutionary Guard -- is a familiar one, and Delijani fails to do it justice. Additional drama provided by the background of the Iran-Iraq War is too colorless to generate a strong emotional response.

There are times when Delijani's writing shows promise -- she isn't completely unskilled -- and I give her credit for telling an important story. She just doesn't tell it with the authority and power that it deserves.

NOT RECOMMENDED