REVIEW: City of Shadows by Ariana Franklin

City of Shad­ows (2006) by Ari­ana Franklin revis­its the story of Anna Ander­son, a young Pol­ish woman, who had claimed in real life to be the long lost daugh­ter of Russia’s last czar.

While many peo­ple embrace the notion that Anas­ta­sia escaped, Anna Ander­son finds her­self the tar­get of an elu­sive killer lurk­ing in the shad­ows, wait­ing to silence her forever.

In “City of Shad­ows”, the story opens with a crime tak­ing place on a bridge, in the cloak of dark­ness and shadow. A man and a woman strug­gling in the dark. The mood is deli­ciously and eerily sin­is­ter. The story then moves on and we are soon intro­duced to cabaret owner, Prince Nick who is a second-rate crook run­ning high end night clubs in Berlin that serves mostly polit­i­cal dig­ni­taries. Nick’s sec­re­tary, Esther Solomonova, is his sound­ing board and occa­sional lover between roman­tic flings.

The story is told mostly through the eyes of Esther, a Russ­ian refugee with a dis­fig­ur­ing scar on her face that was a result of a pogrom. She’s been to hell and back. Her fam­ily was wiped out by the pogrom and she refuses to bow down to survivor’s guilt. She is prac­ti­cal and resilient. She gets pulled along by Nick’s scheme, to pass off Anna Ander­son as the mur­dered czar’s long lost daugh­ter, Grand Duchess Anas­ta­sia in order to claim the Romanov inheritance.

Nick invests in Anna Anderson’s story by pro­vid­ing for her a place to stay with Esther and Natalya, a show girl in one of Nick’s clubs. Anna later proves to be more trou­ble than she’s worth. While at the asy­lum another inmate claims that Anna was being stalked by a “Checka” that would show up every sixth week­end. Every­one dis­misses this idea as the para­noia of the men­tally insane. How­ever, soon after Anna is dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal and put into Nick’s care, bod­ies start to pile up. What was once a young woman’s delu­sional fan­tasies turns out to be more truth than myth. Some­one from Anna’s past is hunt­ing her and Anna refuses to say any­thing about her life prior to her being locked up in the asy­lum. The hunt is on to find this clever and elu­sive killer who feels threat­ened by Anna and her cohorts.

The story is bro­ken down into two parts and spans about a decade. The first part of the book was more grip­ping for me than the sec­ond part. The dis­per­sal of his­tory the author weaves into the story about the Romanov fam­ily and their grisly deaths was akin to hear­ing a ghost story told around a camp fire. The econ­omy in Ger­many is ter­ri­ble. Many peo­ple are job­less, hun­gry and dispir­ited and feel they lack a strong leader. The story takes place right when Hitler is on the cusp of gain­ing power and direct­ing Ger­many down a treach­er­ous path. The body count in the story was some­what high and had a few mem­bers in it that I hadn’t expected to join it. I hate sur­prises like that but it keeps read­ers on their toes.

The sec­ond part of the story arc focuses relent­lessly on the where­abouts of a killer who is sus­pected to be apart of Hitler’s brown­shirt storm troop­ers (SA). Inspec­tor Schmidt’s ter­tiary POV dom­i­nated this part of the story. Schmidt served in the West­ern front and now he is a mar­ried police offi­cer with a baby on the way. Schmidt is a hon­est and hard­work­ing man and a believer of law and order. He is deter­mined to catch a killer and bring him to justice.

What I love about Ms. Franklin ‘s work is that she has the skill of incor­po­rat­ing facts with­out it feel­ing like an info dump and her recre­ation of a tur­bu­lent Ger­many made me feel as if I was actu­ally there. As much as I enjoyed the story, the pac­ing was a bit uneven and the plot tended to wan­der. There’s a brief romance that devel­ops and it is a nice bonus but it is ter­tiary. The mur­der mys­tery took it’s time unfold­ing and I found myself heav­ily invested in who the bad guy was and uncov­er­ing the motive behind his actions.

The ever evolv­ing and often vio­lent polit­i­cal cli­mate of Ger­many played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the story and kept me on the edge of my seat. The slow infil­tra­tion of the police force by the SS and the announce­ment of Hitler’s appoint­ment as Chan­cel­lor helped make the cli­matic end­ing to this story a edge of your seat nail biter. It really is a race against time to find a killer who is lit­er­ally pro­tected and above the law now that the Nazi’s are in power. The author does an excel­lent job with the mood and her deft char­ac­ter­i­za­tions make this story one you’d rec­om­mend with­out reser­va­tions. This is sus­pense at it’s best despite the trou­ble I had with the pac­ing. City of Shad­ows is a very well told thriller by an author who is the mas­ter of telling, well, great sto­ries. B+.

Other nov­els I’ve enjoyed by this author under the Ari­ana Franklin pen name: Mis­tress of the Art of Death, The Serpent’s Tale and under the name of Diana Nor­man: The Vizard Mask, Blood Royal, Tak­ing Lib­er­ties and A Catch of Con­se­quence.

*****

This review is apart of TBR Day that my fel­low read­ers and I are par­tic­i­pat­ing in until Decem­ber 2008. The goal is to read at least one book from your TBR pile and review it each month. Please make sure to visit the other par­tic­i­pants of this challenge.