The Silent Death
This is the second in the Gereon Rath series, after Babylon Berlin. It is February 1930, and Inspector Rath is still with the Berlin police, working on a number of minor cases, until an actress, Betty Winter, dies in an apparent accident at a film studio, while a new “talkie” is being made. Rath soon establishes that the death was caused by sabotage to film equipment. He also gets involved in private cases involving a young Konrad Adenauer, then Mayor of Cologne, and is also tasked to find a missing actress, Vivian Franck, who appeared in the previous novel. Rath is a spiky and rather difficult character. He has his own demons, prefers to work alone, has little (often understandable) respect for senior police staff and is not terribly likeable nor as brilliant as detective as he thinks he is. The background focussing on the German cinema industry is excellent, as is the topographical knowledge of expanding, vibrant, sassy Berlin in 1930. The story rips along in an easy, entertaining police-procedural read, though it is not what can be classified as a whodunit as the murderer is revealed to the reader during the narrative, and we are waiting for the police to make the right connections and to catch up.
