Berlin Centre (Reim #3) by Max Hertzberg

Berlin Centre (Reim #3) Reviews

• 
  Michael Dane

  Berlin Centre – Max Hertzberg.
  
  Berlin Centre is the third of Max Hertzberg’s novels set in the mid eighties and following the adventures and misadventures of Stasi Officer Lieutenant Reim.
  
  The novels are written in the first person and paint a picture of Reim as the world weary and cynical cop that we all know from a thousand novels and television series. As a morally ambiguous anti-hero Reim is very much in the mould of Phillip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther. Intriguingly we are never told whether Reim believes, or ever believed in the GDR experiment.
  
  Hertzberg was previously a Stasi and East German Communist Party archivist, and his novels are filled with a host of colourful and believable details about life in East Germany. There is a helpful glossary for readers who are unfamiliar with Trabants, Doppelkorn and Stasi slang although I referred to it only rarely as the context usually made it unnecessary. A colleague comes to Reim with news of a rumour from a West German defector that there is a mole at the heart of the Stasi’s Berlin Centre, Reim agrees to investigate, but cautiously. He must navigate the bureaucracy and political intrigues of the Stasi itself and every move he makes must have a corresponding escape route of plausibility, deniability, or both. Above all he must trust nobody, ever, Reim’s investigation takes him for the first time into West Germany where things become unexpectedly complicated.
  
  This is a good adventure story with enough action to keep most readers satisfied but the real strength of the novel is the very believable world that Hertzberg creates. It is a little like Deighton’s Game, Set and Match novels written from the other side and perfectly portrays the paranoia of living in a Stasi state, even if one is a Stasi officer.
• 
  David C Ward

  A mole hunt and a West German defector. The Reim books are about bureaucratic turf fighting as much as they are straight spy novels. There’s a fair amount of field action in this one as well as the usual file searching. Hertzberg is a good writer but the deadly conformity of the GDR makes this trilogy kind of flat - everyone is paranoid but the stakes are so low.
• 
  Lorraine Webb

  Slightly tortuous in places but good
  
  A good read with a great twist. Just a bit too confusing at times (this may just be me, I realise! ) which is the reason for dropping a couple of stars. But good enough to keep me going to the end. I like the character of Reim and the setting and am looking forward to the next.
• 
  PeterK B

  I love this series but the atmosphere is so dark and oppressive, I wonder whether many others would appreciate it.
  
  For the mass market, David Young's Stasi series is probably preferable...more of a commercial success, I assume. Those books are fine but I prefer the gritty realism of the Hertzberg series.
• 
  Ron Welton

  Berlin Centre, the third book of the Reim series offers the same clear fast-paced action, finely detailed setting, and the same inter-agency machinations as the first two books. Reim, though still ruthlessly opportunistic in preserving his own hide, shows for the first time a susceptibility, if only slight, to human compassion.