Customer Reviews

Brother Grimm

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought that Mr. Russels first novel "Blood Eagle" was not only very well written, fleshing out nicely the characters, giving them faces and thoughts and all, but also stuctured in a way that more reflected reality than you would normally expect from a whodunnit novel.

His second book, "Brother Grimm" is even better. It follows the same team of Hamburg murder detectives as "Blood Eagle", Jan Fabel and his murder commission officers. Once again the writing is spot on, captivating, and yet somehow manages to give this police thriller another dimension. A dimension of litterature really (in lack of better words anyway). The author does seem to be particularly fond of the words "azure blue", which he uses two times on the opening page and more throughout the novel.

The story and the plot itself, is very well made up. We're kept guessing till the very end who the grim murderer is, and along the way we're led through many a wild goose chase, but it dosen't subtract or lessen the pace or 'feel' one bit, it actually adds to it.

A very good thing about this novel is, that you can reed as a stand alone adventure without having read the first story about the Hamburg murder commission team. Of course having read the first novel will only add to the experience, but it is not a must.

To reiterate: well written, well thought out, well plotted, very recommendable.

A girl's body lies, posed, on the pale sand of a Hamburg beach, a message concealed in her hand. 'I have been underground, and now it is time for me to return home...' Jan Fabel, of the Hamburg murder squad, struggles to interpret the twisted imagery of a dark and brutal mind. Four days later, a man and a woman are found deep in woodland, their throats slashed deep and wide, the names 'Hansel' and 'Gretel', in the same, tiny, obsessively neat writing, rolled tight and pressed into their hands. It becomes clear that each new crime is a grisly reference to folk stories collected almost two hundred years ago by the Brothers Grimm. The hunt is on for a serial killer who is exploring the darkest, most fundamental fears hidden in ancient fairy tales. A predator who kills and then disappears into the shadows. A monster we all learned to fear in childhood.

Murder is no fairy tale

Pro:
I purchased this book on a whim, had never heard of the author and had never even read a brothers Grimm fairytale.

This was a very unique story to be told. An unknown person kills people in refrence to fairytales from the brothers grimm, detective fabel and his team realize they must find the murderer before he kills again. The murderer however has impeccable percision when dealing with his victims, paying careful attention not to leave any clues tying him back to the murder...

I have never read a brothers grimm fairytale however the book read and explained well enough so that it wasn't completely necessary, only after the completion of the book did i decide to introduce myself to the tales mentioned and it made me enjoy the book even more

This would make a great movie, i could visualize it clearly whilst reading it

con
This story takes place in Germany so there were quite a few phrases and terms i was unfamiliar with.

Plot summaries are provided in the Ed comments, and in some revs, so I won't repeat them here.

To the jaded palates of this age, old-fashioned whodunits and PPs are not enough. As with sex, stronger and stronger stimuli are needed to interest/shock the reader, and thus render the book interesting in absence of literary merit. So, in the thriller/mystery genre, the race is on to provide some, then more, then maximal, gore/villainy/psychosis. But the writing must be good enough to keep some control on the overall shape of the story: otherwise you just pass from a sickening scene to the next, interspeded with meaningless personal background details needed (presumably) for the next books in the series, where "character development" will take place. Perhaps if this series lasts ten or twelve episodes and films, Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar Fabel will evolve and retire, together with his team, and in the process the countless and (here) meaningless disgressions about mothers, brothers, gilrfriends, backgrounds, infancy memories, personal traumas, and countless other details that have no bearing whatsoever on this volume's plot, will acquire a significance here lacking. We will then have the thriller equivalent of "The Forsyte Saga" minus its quality (by the way, have you ever thought that these series are the contemporary equivalent of the multigenerational epics of the 19th and 20th C? My.)

But taken alone, this first installment could have been cut in half without loosing any interest it might have had. Thus in reading it I felt cloyed/stuffed/gorged, and longed for the action, grisly as it is, to proceed unencumbered by the details of, say, the simpathizing between (divorced because work-obsessed, how could it be otherwise?) Fabel's (bewitchingly beautiful, idem) girlfriend and daughter (mercifully, little detail here about her musings). In theory, these endless details should "flesh out the characters", inject "human interest" into the story; but here -and this is where lit skill should enter the picture but doesn't- they don't. I couldn't care less whether, say, Maria Klee finally got over her trauma after the kicking episode or not. And anyway, what meaning has that trauma for the novel? None. And so with Anna Wolff's "toughness" and Jewishness, and the Nazi memories, and ... .

The plot? Implausible, with threads -here- left hanging. The English: what about "more grey"? The research? Meritorious: I learned some things about the brothers, and for this I award a second star.

Conclusion: as with porn, you should ration your yearly ingestion of material with utterly no redeeming social value, so skip this product.