This novel is set in the 1930s and features Charles Cooper, a well-educated, cultured Englishman who meanders through life. Upon receiving an inheritance, he quits his job and travels across the continent. He allows himself to be talked into an excursion to Moscow, where he ends up as a Soviet spy—more from pushy recruitment and passive compliance than any belief in the cause. He has no interest in the USSR and certainly no desire to be a spy. Upon his return to London, he is recruited by the Annexe, part of the security services, and becomes an unenthusiastic member of competing agencies working against each other. He is forced into the role as the British require him to participate in a murder in Brussels, while his Soviet self at home bludgeons a professor capable of identifying him as working for the Reds. A name change and his failure to report cause the Soviets to lose track of him. While Britain hunts for a mole—him—he quietly pursues his assignment, infiltrating the British Communist Party. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact throws Europe into turmoil, setting the stage for war and virtually destroying the BCP. In Moscow, the OMS that Cooper was part of is disbanded, and he eliminates his last handler in London. The Annexe, too, is shut down, and his boss hands him some money and tells him to disappear—an order he enthusiastically follows.
11.04.2025
The March Fallen, Kutscher - B +
It’s early 1933, and Gereon and Charly are planning their wedding. Gereon is off to Köln during Carnival when, on February 27th, the Reichstag fire erupts in Berlin. He is recalled as Berlin begins a communist witch hunt. The Alex is filled with brownshirts as the SA are now adjunct policemen. One of the first casualties of the new regime is DCI Böhm of Homicide, whose downfall comes from pursuing the death of a homeless veteran when he should have been supporting the new Germany. Charly is in the middle of a case involving a young woman charged with burning down a shelter, killing many—including her own father, a morphine-addicted, crippled veteran. Rath is briefly assigned to the Political Section to interview communists but is soon back on his murder case as two more veterans are found murdered with the same trench knife. It looks like the cases are merging, as the young woman Charly is pursuing is also being chased by the man believed to be behind the veterans’ murders.
After tireless efforts around Berlin and Bonn, Gereon eliminates his most likely suspect, leaving only the suspect in Charly’s case. And someone has just killed him. Gereon concludes the actual killer is a veteran currently making a name for himself with a novel that the Nazis love and are promoting. Rath confronts him; he acknowledges his guilt and is compelled to assign the royalties from his book of lies to Hannah, Charly’s young waif. For Gereon, it was the proper outcome, as he could not prove the murders. Charlotte Ritter resigns from the police force because she despises the Nazi regime and refuses to work for them. Over the summer, Charlotte and Gereon marry. This spectacular series gets better and better.
The television series’ season five has been completed but not yet released in the U.S. There are five more novels that run through 1938 that have yet to be translated.
This series has excelled in presenting the decadence of the end of the Weimar era, the depths of poverty that led to the conflicts between the Nazis and the communists, and, most fascinatingly, the plight of the honored but injured veterans. This volume oozes the hatred and antisemitism that accompanied the Nazi ascension to power in early 1933. “The Jews are our misfortune. This was the solution to all Germany’s problems in the present, in the future, and in the past.”