GoodReads meta data is pages 292 rated by 3.93 by 4110 litizens.
Genre: thriller
Verdict: No thank you.
Set-up: Dresden December 1944. Max is a police officer with a gimpy leg from a World War I wound at Ypres. The privations of the war increase every day, but Max soldiers on, as does his wife Karen (a hausfrau without a personality). Their two sons are in the Wehrmacht and a constant source of worry, but there is no communication.
There follows the first of a series anatomical murders of a young woman. Others follow. The police chief is a Nazi zealot and does not care about the murders of these slatterns. He is pure cardboard, sent to stymie and annoy both Max and the Reader.
A police procedural follows as Max slowly traverses the highways and byways of Dresden after clues, thwarted by his Cardboard superior. There is a lot of Dresden, and even more on the human tide from the east as the Red Army surges ahead. Suppressed panic is the atmosphere.
More anatomical murders follow. Max stays at it as the world around him disintegrates. Karen spends all day scrounging food and fuel for the apartment.
Then it gets worse. The fire bombing occurs and there are gruelling descriptions with more anatomical details. These are well done but not to my taste. One injured and distraught woman Max encountered wandering through the rubble after raid of 13-15 February 1945 cries out, ‘Why are these devils doing this to us.’ Why indeed? Meanwhile, the few remaining Jews are eliminated along with anyone else whose Hitler salute is not crisp enough.
I had hoped for more on the cognitive dissonance of the last days, but there isn’t much aside from references to wonder weapons and innate superiority of Germans. Then it was over.
Then the war ends and Russians take over. The murders continue. The Russians are amused that Germans have been reduced to killing each other. When some Russian soldiers are living up to the stereotype and Max pleads with his Russian liaison officer to stop them, the Rusky has a good retort that silences Max. Partly it is mismatched buddy-story as Max and Rusky work together.
I never did fathom the complications of the plot. Cardboard superior, zealot though he was, hid his one or was it two moronic (think drooling Republican congressmen and you have it) sons and…. Then there is kindly doctor upon whom no suspicion falls. Well, you know who dun it. Many others have things to hide and it all gets tangled. Why did Doctor and Zealot stay? No idea. Explanations are given but they don’t compute.
Both Max’s sons survive to give us a happy ending. Although the sons do not communicate with their parents each knows where the other is: One in a Russian POW camp and the other in a French prison. Telepathy?
It is rich in descriptions of wartime Dresden and daily life as the world ends. There is a continuous narrative and not the chopped and changed discontinuous narrative that thrillers have all too often instead of a plot. But it is over-plotted and almost incomprehensible because of that.
There is no mention of the countless French POWs worked to death in war factories in Dresden, nor any reference to the manufacture of poison gas in Dresden for use in the death camps. It was a key transportation hub east to west. There were also USA POWs there, too, namely Kurt Vonnegut and company. And one scene in these pages takes place in a slaughterhouse. Of David Irving’s exaggerations, fabrications, distortions, and more nothing will be said here.