ceiling lights & chandeliers
shadow and light
berlin between the two world wars . when an executive at the renowned ufa film studios is found dead floating in his office bathtub it falls to nikolai hoffner a chief inspector in the kriminalpolizei to investigate . with the help of fritz lang the german director and alby pimm leader of the most powerful crime syndicate in berlin hoffner finds his case taking him beyond the world of film and into the far more treacherous landscape of berlins sex and drug trade the rise of hitlers brownshirts the sa and the even more astonishing attempts by onetime monarchists to rearm a post versailles germany . being swept up in the case are hoffners new lover an american talent agent for metro goldwyn mayer and his two sons georg who has dropped out of school to work at ufa and sascha his angry older son who unknown to his father has become fully entrenched in the new german workers party as the aide to its berlin leader joseph goebbels . p what a spellbinding novel shadow and light is and what a novelist jonathan rabb has become p when we last met hoffner it was 1919 and he had taken on the disappearance and death of rosa luxembourg in rosa a novel the critic john leonard hailed as a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by raymond chandler and andre malraux . shadow and light is equally brilliant and atmospheric and even harder to put down or shake off . like joseph kanon or alan furst rabb magically fuses a smart energetic narrative with layers of fascinating vividly documented history . the result is a stunning historical thriller created by a writer to celebrate and contend with . p
in 1927 berlin chief inspector nikolai hoffner investigates the death of a film studio executive and finds connections between the citys sex and drug trade an uprising among hitlers brownshirts and an attempt to rearm germany .