Wedding Station, Downing - B+

            This book is a prequel to a series of six that ended almost a decade ago. Five of those six, like this one, are named after a Berlin train station. Wedding was a blue collar neighborhood in the interwar years, populated by communists. 

             John Russell is a crime reporter, an English veteran of the Great War, who has been living in Berlin for nine years. He and his wife are estranged, and he stays because of his devotion to his six year old son. On the night of the 1933 Reichstag fire, a young 'line boy', a male prostitute, is brutally murdered. An SA officer was rumored to have been at the club. Russell diligently pursues the case and eventually finds the young man's diary in which he implicates five top SA men as homosexuals. A close friend suggests getting it to Himmler as it appears the SS and SA are on a collision course. He provides the information to the SS, who, a year later of course, were instrumental in the violent elimination of their rivals.

           He also works on other stories, the disappearance of a designer who happens to be Jewish and predicted the fire; a missing daughter inclined toward communism and devastating her dad, a general on the rise; a genealogist with information on people's now toxic Jewish heritages, as well as  a few others on the seedy side of Berlin life. The excellence of this novel is what epitomizes all good historical fiction. You feel as if you are living in Berlin in the winter of 1933 and watching the world around you fall apart.