Lead Review (Dead of Night)

• Book: Dead of Night
• Location: Berlin
• Author: Simon Scarrow

Review Author: tripfiction

This is no. 2 in the Horst Schenke wartime thriller series and can be read as a stand alone.

The author guides us into the heart of policing, in the icy Winter of 1941 during WW2. Horst Schenke has several investigations on-going, focussing mainly on a forgery ring. He is then invited to look into the death of an eminent doctor, Manfred Schmesler. It was a gruesome and bloody death, orchestrated it seems by his own hand, but even a cursory inspection of the scene indicates that he was murdered. His widow is absolutely clear that he would never have committed suicide. As the days pass, Schenke’s investigation is closed down and he has a warning from the highest authority – Heydrich himself – that he is to stop his investigations. Cleary that alerts him that something is rather amiss.

Simultaneously he is alerted to the fact that young disabled children are being sent to an institution just outside Potsdam and at first the parents are happy with the referral, but once they are denied contact and then notified that their child has passed away, they are shocked and traumatised. Schenke knows that it is his moral duty to look into what is going on.

What the author does particularly well is to set his characters in context and really highlight how difficult it must have been to function within the confines of a repressive and cruel regime. Schenke’s girlfriend Karin takes Horst to task about some of his decisions, which are made in the full knowledge that he is under scrutiny by the authorities, but she feels he has not taken a sufficiently robust stance. This leads to a full blown argument and whether the relationship can be sustained, remains to be seen.

The author has a very measured way of laying out his plot and keeping the reader hooked in.

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