Straight into Darkness

[cornerofmadness]

Straight into Darkness by Faye Kellerman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I listened to this one on a long drive which might have been a mistake. It was so slow it was putting me to sleep. It's not that it was a bad mystery per se but it was so bogged down with the historical aspects it goes nowhere fast and has one of the worst endings I've read in a long time. Kellerman is an orthodox Jew and she was obviously working through some things here setting this in the early 30s with the rise of Hitler. So here's your content warning, excessive amounts of anti-Semitism is in this.

And that's what tanked this for me. There is tons of gratuitous violence in this to show how bad the Nazis were that have nothing to do with the case. The detective even meets Hitler once in the course of it and tells him off. The Brown shirts create a ton of very graphic violence against suspects and to the police as well. Detective Berg himself is so severely beaten trying to transport the Jewish man his superiors want to frame for the murders he's hospitalized. More detectives are beaten at a political rally.

The basic plot is multiple women were choked and beaten to death, found in fine clothing with one shoe missing. The higher ups refuse to believe or at least admit to the fact that they are linked crimes because then they couldn't blame the women's Jewish husbands/boyfriends.

And if it had stuck with the crime, this wouldn't have been a bad mystery or if even the backdrop of the rise of Nazism was kept brief it would have worked. However, the forays into the anti-Semitism of the Nazis (including how Berg was treated with his Jewish girlfriend that he's cheating on his wife with) are LONG, seemingly endless. By the time those scenes were over I'd forgotten half the clues from the mystery. They distract from rather than add to the tension. Because we know Berg's wrong about Hitler winning. We know what becomes of Munich and its Jewish population. We know how awful the Nazis are without this wallow in their violence (though given some attitudes today maybe it was meant as a reminder of how bad it can become). It's a case of a little pepper adds spice but too much spoils the dish.



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