Babylon Berlin

Gereon Rath, Book 1

By: Volker Kutscher

Narrated by: Mark Meadows

Berlin, 1929. Detective Inspector Rath was a successful career officer in the Cologne Homicide Division before a shooting incident in which he inadvertently killed a man. He has been transferred to the vice squad in Berlin, a job he detests even though he finds a new friend in his boss, Chief Inspector Wolter.

There is seething unrest in the city, and the Commissioner of Police has ordered the vice squad to ruthlessly enforce the ban on May Day demonstrations. The result is catastrophic, with many dead and injured, and a state of emergency is declared in the Communist strongholds of the city.

When a car is hauled out of Berlin's Landwehr Canal with a mutilated corpse inside, the Commissioner decides to use this mystery to divert the attention of press and public from the casualties of the demonstrations. The biggest problem is that the corpse cannot be identified.

Volker Kutscher was born in 1962 in Lindlar, West Germany. He is the author of the enormously successful Gereon Rath crime series which, in addition to compelling narrative, is notable for its scrupulous accuracy about Germany in the years between its beginning in 1927 and the approach to the Second World War.

©2016 Volker Kutscher (P)2016 Audible, Ltd

Cops speak like Cockneys in Berlin?

The narrator uses a very neutral English accent for the narrative prose, a variety of United Kingdom accents for the dialog, and the German place and street names. The result is a distracting mess. And to take the absurdity one step further, character accents are stereotypical based on job and class. The uniformed policeman speaks in a Cockney accent. The higher ups sound like they might work for Scotland Yard. On top of the accent problem, the translator substitutes English Idioms for German Idioms. This all might work if you from the UK, but not for an American English speaker.

If you have an ear for accents and idioms, you will find this jarring. I tried hard to ignore the accents, but then something ridiculous would get thrown in and completely pull me out of the story. It did not have to be this way. It was grating on the ears right next to the dialect rendered in Cockney and Scottish Brogue.

I had been hoping to read the entire series, but I can't finish the first book.

Not as good as the TV series

The story is similar and the writing is OK, but it has nothing of the pizazz of the TV series.

Ok plot, weak writing, decent reader

The plot is ok. Period details are interesting, romance is poorly written. Reader starts off seeming too slow and stilted, but has a good range of accents and voices (and good balance between German vs Anglicized pronunciation for names)

if you are a fan of German detective novels?...

Loved the narrator! Loved the setting and story! on par with Phillip Kerr Bernie Gunther series!

Really entertaining and well crafted story

I liked the story a lot albeit a bit forced at times but well thought of and rounded up quite satisfactorily