Garden of Beasts by
Jeffery Deaver
pbk out July 04
(Hodder)
at £10.99
Deaver's nineteenth novel, is I think, something of a departure for him. It's a period
piece set in Hitler's Germany in Olympics year, 1936. the year that Jesse Owens' golden
triumphs so irritated the dictator as to cause Hitler to shun the medal ceremonies. Fittingly,
Owens makes a fleeting appearance in the book along with someone who links the book
nicely to Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme stories.
It all starts when 'button man' Paul Schumann is led into a trap. A button man is the
slang name for a hired killer in thirties New York, the city of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky
and Bugsy Siegel. But Paul is different from the normal run-of-the-mill killer. He has been
sucked into the game and is sick of it. And he only kills those who are themselves evil and
deserve it. The trap has been sprung by Naval Intelligence, the precursor of the CIA,
and in return for his freedom and a new start, Paul must carry out one more killing. But this
time it's in Germany where he must ply his trade. The target is Reinhard Ernst, who is in
charge of rearmament in Hitler's government, and to 'touch him off' (as Paul calls it) might
avert a possible war.
Paul is soon plunged into the world of a pre-war Germany gearing up for the Olympic
Games, a world of hardships and deprivation, brutal Brownshirts, Jewish persecutions and
unspeakable atrocities. The comparison for the reader between where Paul is, and where he
has come from, is inevitable. Hitler and his gang are no better than the New York mobsters,
and Paul's act of murder equally justifiable. To carry out his task though, Paul must avoid the
Nazi Gestapo, who seem to have been alerted to his presence, and the dogged police work of
criminal Police Inspector Willi Kohl, who can place Paul at the scene of a murder. To help
him, Paul has the services of American agent Reggie Morgan, and German gangster Otto
Webber. The story unfolds in barely seventy-two hours. Yet on the way, he also manages an
affair with his landlady, Kathe Richter. Garden of Beasts has curious parallels with a recent novel by Murray Davies called
The Devil's Handshake (Macmillan, 2002). In that book, an undercover agent is sent to
assassinate Hitler. He is pursued by the Gestap and a German detective because of a
necessary killing, and it turns out he has been set up to fail. There's also a love affair with a
German woman. So the outline is similar to Garden of Beasts, but the style quite different.
This one is vintage Deaver.
He manages to pull off a portrayal of Germany as seen through fresh, contemporary
eyes. However, I was a little distracted by Deaver's insistence on translating all the German
place names into English. 'Under the Lindens' just doesn't have the same flavour and
connotation as Unter den Linden. Be that as it may, he does make you look anew at pre-war
Germany, as Paul begins an inexorable journey from naïve innocence, observing derelict
properties in the midst of opulence, to harsh understanding, realising that Jews have been
forced out of their homes in the name of National Socialism. In this way, Deaver takes us
into the heart of the dichotomy facing the German people, then over the charisma of their
leader and the acts committed in his name. The embodiment of the dilemma is Paul's target,
Reinhard Ernst, who is serving Hitler's aims, but at the same time is a caring family man
carrying out a benign study to improve the situation in the armed forces. But
characteristically, Deaver is not satisfied just serving up a picture of an historical era. He
intrigues and entertains with a driving plot full of startling twists and turns. Nothing is quite
what it seems to be, and just as the veneer the Nazis put on the 1936 Olympics cracked apart,
so does the surface appearance of the events and the characters in Garden of Beasts. Even
after you think you've twisted and turned past the final bend, there's another unexpected shift
of gear to keep you glued to the page to the very end.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
Garden of Beasts by
Jeffery Deaver
