The Arms Maker of Berlin

This book was very enjoyable to read. Very engaging and fast paced. It has some great twist. I felt bad for Baur in the end.

After reading The Arms Maker of Berlin and The Prisoner of Guantánamo I'd like to thank Dan Fesperman for enriching my life as have Alan Furst and Robert Wilson. The Arms Maker of Berlin weaves a plausible and intricate plot and peoples it with psychologically complicated and therefore interesting characters. Kurt Bauer's tormented and tragic life is exceptionally thought-provoking. Well done.

This novel strikes the perfect balance between believability and drama. Unlike most spy thrillers, the author doesn't let this one get away from him. The ending is satisfying and not gimmicky. It is well-researched, so you will probably actually learn some history. I'm very picky when it comes to novels, but this one was among the best spy thrillers that I've read.

A couple of ambitious history professors go up against a ruthless assassin (and sometimes each other) to track down four missing Nazi-era files in Fesperman's (The Small Boat of Great Sorrows) latest political thriller. Snatched from his desk deep in the archives of his university library in the middle of the night, Professor Nat Turnbull, specialist in the Nazi resistance movement, is understandably suspicious. But his abductor proves to be an FBI agent without a minute to lose. Turns out Nat's old mentor, Gordon Wolfe, now 84, has been arrested in possession of top-secret FBI archives, an intelligence trove stolen at the end of WWII. Now the FBI needs to know what's in them - particularly anything having to do with The White Rose, a German resistance group, crushed before the war's end. The files detail Allied intelligence operations in Switzerland, mostly centered around Allen Dulles, later the first civilian director of the CIA. Gordon always claimed to be one of his operatives, recruited after his plane was shot down over Switzerland. But Gordon's war record has recently been called into question. Gordon blames the feds for that and tells Nat to dig deep and dig fast and the truth will set them both free. Next to approach Nat is an attractive young scholar from East Germany. Berta Heinkel tells him that four files - the only ones that really matter - are missing. She believes they contain the facts about the betrayal of the Berlin chapter of the White Rose and the wartime activities of a powerful German industrialist who was just a 17-year-old boy at the time. Intrigued, not sure who or what to believe, Nat hedges his bets. But Gordon dies of a heart attack in jail, jurisdictional fights break out and Nat teams up with Berta to grab what they can before it's all whisked away. Armed with stolen copies of the archives and a cryptic parcel Gordon left for Nat, the pair track down wartime leads in Bern, Germany and the U.S. Despite their growing attraction, however, they are definitely not a team. The intricate, suspenseful story alternates between Nat's view and the wartime memories of Kurt Bauer, the lovesick son of a German armaments maker. Fesperman vividly evokes Germany in the last years of the war - a place of uncertainty, oppression and paranoia, rife with scheming and treachery. Much of Berlin is in ruins, the war seems lost, but doubt is treason. Still, those with the means must try and safeguard their future for a world without Hitler. Bauer comes of age in a smog of dread, youthful fervor and blundering and his actions reverberate down to the present day. A smart, fast-paced tale of heroism, tragedy and guilty secrets worth killing for more than half a century later, this will appeal to anyone interested in World War II atmosphere and intrigue, however unlikely it seems that an academic, no matter how ambitious and romantic, would put his life in peril over some Nazi secrets.

I love reading great suspense novels, so when the guy sitting opposite me on the subway was so engrossed in his book that he missed his stop altogether and didn't realize the fact for nearly 10 minutes, I had to wonder what he was reading. Turns out it was Dan Fesperman's latest thriller -- a book by an author I hadn't even heard of. The plot seemed intriguing enough, combining as it did a historical mystery revolving around the fate of a White Rose Nazi resistance cell in Berlin just after the fall of Stalingrad with the appearance of long-missing archival material about the OSS's wartime operations in Bern, just across the Swiss border. So I snapped it up, and don't regret it despite some rather stereotypical characters and wince-inducing writing. ("Keep working with me and you will have a far better chance of getting all that you want", the 21st century femme fatale trying to solve both the contemporary mystery and the historical puzzle tells our hero. He muses to himself, predictably enough: "The remark was stirring on several levels." Nevertheless, during a summer that has brought some disappointing books from authors whose work I've previously enjoyed (Daniel Silva, flagging in the Gabriel Allon series; Christopher Reichs, still not at his best; Richard North Patterson in the yet-to-be released The Spire, a shadow of his best work), this was a very welcome addition to my mindless summer reading list. As Nat Turnbull scurries from North America to Europe and back again in search of the clues that will help him resolve the mystery that links the OSS with the White Rose operation and that his academic mentor (a former OSS spy) had long concealed, I began to understand exactly why that guy had missed his subway stop. At its heart, this is a great story of secrets and betrayals, full of gnarly twists and turns that suspense book addicts will revel in, and one that displays Fesperman's knowledge of the worlds of academia and espionage, as well as giving the reader fascinating insight into what life might have been like during wartime Berlin. Best of all, none of the twists feel contrived or telegraphed so far in advance that they lose their punch, even the final whopper set at the site of the former Gestapo prison in Berlin. That all more than makes up for the eye-rolling I found myself doing when reading Fesperman's characterization of Berta Heinkel, the young German woman who may be Turnbull's ally in the quest for the documents or his biggest rival. (I didn't need a big romantic subplot to make this a great read, but Berta emerged as too quirky to be true; indeed, the characters are often less convincing than the plot.) There are stronger Nazi/contemporary suspense novels out there -- my favorites would include two stellar early offerings from Greg Iles, Spandau Phoenix: A Novel and Black Cross) and while this isn't that good (and far from as good as the works by Alan Furst, who sets all his books in the 1930s and the wartime years), it's st