March 15, 2016
A movie star faces the nightmare of living in Nazi Germany in this second volume of a planned trilogy. Clara Vine is an Anglo-German actress who has thus far succeeded in hiding the fact that she's of partially Jewish heritage. Her English lover, Leo Quinn, a passport control officer in Berlin, recruited her to spy "on the private life of the Third Reich" (The Scent of Secrets, 2015), and then shortly afterward, he disappeared. Clara travels to London in 1939 to attend a ball she's been invited to, given by a man she's never met, and finds that she's been summoned by a newly hatched espionage agency. British intelligence asks her to try to discover whether Hitler is planning to make a deal with the Soviets--and warns her to forget the missing Leo, who she refuses to believe is dead. Despite the assurances of the Fuhrer, many Germans know that war is near. Back in Berlin, Clara--who's afraid her own apartment is being watched--is staying at a friend's house near the Faith and Beauty Society headquarters, where Aryan girls are groomed to marry high-ranking Nazis. Clara is deeply disturbed when Lottie Franke, the most beautiful, talented, and unorthodox girl in the training program, is found murdered nearby. As an actress, Clara knows all the top-ranked Nazis and their wives and has opportunities to meet foreign reporters and travel abroad. On a trip to Paris for a photo shoot, she mistakes the handsome, wealthy Conrad Adler for Leo even though she'd already met the charismatic Obersturmbannfuhrer at a party in Germany. She's upset by both his pursuit of her and her physical response to him. On her return to Germany, she starts shooting a film under the direction of Leni Riefenstahl, looks for Lottie's killer at the behest of the girl's best friend, and tries to find out Hitler's plans for war. The paranoid pressure-cooker atmosphere of Berlin forces her to make dangerous decisions every day. Darkly brooding horror hangs over Germany; an irresistible page-turner packed with historical detail and told from a most unusual perspective.
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May 1, 2016
Thynne steps up the pace in this second in a trilogy, following The Scent of Secrets (2015). Actress and British intelligence agent Clara Vine again mixes with Nazi leaders just prior to WWII, risking both career and life to find out who killed a seemingly innocent young woman from the Faith and Beauty School in Berlin. Clara pines for her British lover, who may be missing or even dead, and is forced daily to claim a fully German identity, while knowing that, at any moment, she may be unmasked as half-English, Jewish, and a spy. The narrative often reads like a walking-tour guide, filled with the lengthy names of streets, neighborhoods, and city sightsrendered auf Deutschand that serves more as a distraction than a scene-setter. Still, readers will appreciate the author's impeccable research. Combining love story and murder mystery, and featuring cameos by the Nazi nefarious, the novel holds our interest with steadily building suspense leading to a surprising denouement, with satisfying hints of more to come. Clara's story compares well with those of Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope and Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)