The Second Son

On the Eve of Hitler’s Olympics, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner is forced out of the Kriminalpolizei because he is a half Jew. Hoffner is not surprised given the rise of Nazism, and anyway his focus is elsewhere. His son Georg is missing in Spain, swept up in the sudden outbreak of the civil war. He has already lost Sascha, his elder son, to the Nazi regime. But Georg is not what he appears to be, and when Hoffner discovers this, he is determined to save the one son he can.

The Second Son is the final installment in Jonathan Rabb’s Berlin trilogy, set between the two world wars.

Now, nearly ten years after the events of Shadow and Light, Hoffner finds himself tossed into the chaos that is Spain – where he quickly meets anarchists, Soviet and British secret agents, and a female doctor called Mila Pera – as he follows a trail of clues left by Georg.

Rabb delivers another brilliant atmospheric work.

On Rosa: “a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and Andre Malraux.” Harper’s

On Shadow and Light (2009), “brilliantly plotted narrative.” Washington Post