Garden of Beasts

A Novel of Berlin 1936

By: Jeffery Deaver

Narrated by: Jefferson Mays

In the most ingenious and provocative thriller yet from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver, a conscience-plagued mobster turned government hitman struggles to find his moral compass amid rampant treachery and betrayal in 1936 Berlin.

Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known as much for his brilliant tactics as for taking only “righteous” assignments. But then Paul gets caught. And the arresting officer offers him a stark choice: execution or covert government service. Paul is asked to pose as a journalist covering the summer Olympics taking place in Berlin. He’s to hunt down and kill Reinhard Ernst—the ruthless architect of Hitler’s clandestine rearmament. If successful, Paul will be pardoned and given the financial means to go legit.

Paul travels to Germany, takes a room in a boarding house near the Tiergarten—the huge park in central Berlin but also, literally, the “Garden of Beasts”—and begins his hunt. In classic Deaver fashion, the next forty-eight hours are a feverish cat-and-mouse chase, as Paul stalks Ernst through Berlin while a dogged Berlin police officer and the entire Third Reich apparatus search frantically for the American.

Garden of Beasts is packed with fascinating period detail and features a cast of perfectly realized locals, Olympic athletes, and senior Nazi officials—some real, some fictional. With hairpin plot twists, the reigning “master of ticking-bomb suspense” (People) plumbs the nerve-jangling paranoia of pre-war Berlin and steers the story to a breathtaking and wholly unpredictable ending.

The novel won the Steel Dagger award for best espionage thriller of the year from the prestigious Crime Writers’ Associate in the United Kingdom.

great read

love this one. highly recommend it to anyone good story great characters and play between them. keeps you listing from start to end.

Unexpectedly good

It takes me a while to get into war time plots, but this one grabbed me right away. I loved the character of the protagonist, loved even more the German policeman. It really seems unbelievable how ruthless Hitler's régime was, how methodically they tortured even their own citizens.
The narrator was great for the characters.

Entertaining, suspenseful, no gore!!

Clever, with more plot twists than I was expecting. Like a mystery, you don't know who the bad guys all are or how things will turn out until the very end. I was pleased that there was no torture scenes which is unusual but very welcome for a book set in Nazi Germany. Plenty of horrors just in seeing how easy it was/is to form a fascist government and how people will go along with whatever puts them at the top. The good guys can be bad guys and the bad guys can end up being good guys-- it all depends on their moral compass.

Outstanding in every respect. Just what I wanted.

There are many great Audible listens. This is the best of 2019 so far.

A Hitman and the Nazis

Not to be confused with another book I read a few years ago (“In the Garden of Beasts”), “Garden of Beasts” takes its name from the same place, a huge park in the center of Berlin called Tiergarten, literally translated “Garden of Beasts.” This was a fascinating book that weaves actual history and real historical people into a novel of made-up characters. Paul Schumann is an American mobster and hitman whose German parents had used German at home so that Paul was fluent in both English and German. Despite his profession, he has a conscience and believes that he has only killed bad people. He is known for his careful planning that kept him from getting caught, but when his luck runs out, he is offered freedom from prosecution if he will take out Reinhardt Ernst (fictional), the architect of Germany’s pre-war military buildup. Most of the book occurs over 48 hours as he tries to carry out his plot amid the lawlessness of a Germany under the Third Reich with the legitimate police vying with other security and paramilitary organizations who have unbridled authority to enforce the will of the Nazi party. Schumann takes a room in a boarding house just before the opening days of the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Yes, he meets Jesse Owen) and things begin to go wrong from the beginning so that he becomes also the hunted. The story jumps back and forth between Schumann and the detective hot on his trail, resulting in a plot that is engaging and mesmerizing. In addition, things are not always as they seem and subplots and intrigue continue to move the story along. It is hard to find a good place to stop reading when it’s time to do some real work. I thoroughly enjoyed the mixing of fiction with real historical events and people. Highly recommended.