Review: A very good 'Good German'

"The Good German"
By Joseph Kanon
Henry Holt
Fiction
512 pages

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN

(CNN) -- During the summer of 1945, one war was ending and another was beginning. Amid the smoking ruins of Berlin, the leaders of the Allied powers gathered to set a course for Europe in the wake of World War II. At their conference in the suburb of Potsdam, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill (soon to be replaced by Clement Attlee) and Harry Truman also sowed the seeds of the Cold War.

Author Joseph Kanon chooses this seminal event in 20th-century history as the backdrop for his novel of intrigue and suspense, "The Good German." He has chosen well. The Berlin he depicts is a steaming cauldron of violence and deprivation, retribution and debauchery.

His protagonist, magazine writer Jake Geismar, is returning to the city for the first time in four years. Like the other members of the press flocking to the city, he's on assignment to cover the Potsdam Conference.

He has a hidden agenda as well. He wants to find the woman he left behind.

Intricate plot

Hidden agendas abound in "The Good German." The occupying U.S. military is tracking down war criminals, while at the same time spiriting German scientists out of the country. The occupying Russians are doing the same thing, while also pumping up their domestic economy by fueling the vigorous Berlin black market.

Kanon weaves an intricate plot involving the murder of a U.S. soldier, whose body washes ashore literally at the feet of the Allied leaders, and the disappearance of a German mathematician, whose talents are coveted by both Moscow and Washington.

Jake becomes entangled in both mysteries. He's the first American to examine the dead soldier's body, and the woman he's seeking is the wife of the missing scientist.

Right, wrong, and the shadows between

The story unfolds in the shadowy borderland between right and wrong. In Kanon's Berlin, moral imperatives are bent to baser purposes. Even the protagonist, who has no vested interest in the skullduggery that swirls around him, finds it difficult to tell good from evil. And he had seen evil at close range as he followed the victorious Allies on their march to Berlin.

"On the second day, at one of the slave labor camps," Kanon writes, "a skeleton took his hand and kissed it, then held on to it, an obscene gratitude, gibbering something in Slavic -- Polish? Russian? -- and Jake froze, trying not to smell, feeling his hand buckle under the weight of the fierce grip. 'I'm not a soldier,' he said, wanting to run but unable to take his hand away, ashamed, caught now too. The story they'd all missed, the hand you couldn't shake off."

Part detective story, part love story, part espionage thriller, "The Good German" is by turns exciting, thought provoking and heart tugging. Kanon takes a plot worthy of a Deighton or le Carre and wraps it in prose that captures the dangers and the decay that haunted postwar Berlin.

It's more than just a ripping good yarn. It's a book that stays with the reader long after the covers are closed.