5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant New Historical Fiction, April 28, 2009
The third work in Michael Gregorio's historical fiction/mystery is a wonderful follow-up to the first two. Gregorio (actually a husband and wife team) immediately drives the reader into the arcane world of amber mining on the Baltic Coast. Hanno Stiffeniis, the hero, is a Prussian magistrate serving the French rulers. His task: to solve the murders of two female amber miners so as to increase amber production. Hanno has to deal with numerous roadblocks placed by his French masters as well as overcoming the view that he is a traitor to his Prussian co-patriots.
Gregorio is a master at setting the stage. The brutality of conditions that the woman face in recovering the amber from underneath the cold Baltic waters is mind boggling. The antipathy of the French occupiers harkens the reader to conditions our soldiers must face in Iraq as they go about their tasks. Yet Hanno manages to overcome all of the hurdles to once again use the talents he learned from Immanuel Kant to solve the crime.
While prior reading of the first two books in not critical to understanding A Visible Darkness, why deprive yourself of two great books? Readers of C.J. Sansom's books will find A Visible Darkness serious competition. If you are looking for an alternative to historical fiction that apes Dan Brown, A Visible Darkness is a must read.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unusual setting, well-drawn atmosphere, April 20, 2009
Michael Gregorio's third mystery with Procurator Hanno Stiffeniis once again brings the magistrate more than his share of troubles. Living as a Prussian in territory occupied by French troops after the disastrous Battle of Jena, the reader learns, has its share of humiliations both large and small. And yet when a string of murders occur amongst the amber gathering girls working on the shores of the Baltic Sea, the French turn to Stiffeniis and his proven track record to solve the crime. After all, there's a need to keep the trade in priceless amber flowing and thus keep the French war machine running in Spain.
Stiffeniis is certainly caught between a rock and a hard place. Being known to cooperate with an invading force and help assure their continued stripping away of his country's wealth and resources is a risky endeavor. But on the other hand, Prussian women are being murdered, and someone needs to stop the killer. And perhaps with success the French might be obliged and owe a few favors to his town of Lotingen? So, bidding his wife Helena farewell, he heads to Nordkopp to try and stop a monster.
That moral dilemma seems to characterize the shades of grey that pervade the book: few characters and situations are fully what they seem on the surface. Stiffeniis himself lives in fear of the blacker regions of his own soul, a thing he has admitted to few people--the foremost being his mentor, Immanuel Kant, who encouraged his turn to criminal investigation. Each crime he investigates seems to evoke both a passion for justice and a need to better understand that inner darkness.
The first decade of the nineteenth century is keenly drawn, and modern readers will probably find themselves being thankful for the benefits of modern medicine and hygiene more than once. Gregorio's use of Prussia, a rare fictional setting, and Prussian culture and identity at a period of upheaval and change in German history, gives the series a real shine. The crimes are gruesomely vivid, providing urgency to the narrative. Amber, as a valued commodity, a work of art, and a Prussian cultural resource and pride, plays its own vital role in the tale.
The details are sharp and the mood is gloomy and heavy, well representative of horrid acts committed in a subjugated nation. "A Visible Darkness" doesn't make for easy reading, but it's an intense, compelling book that's well worth the time.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Murder in Napoleon's Prussia, August 18, 2009
Chafing under the heavy yoke of French occupation, Prussian magistrate Hanno Stefaniis, buttoned-up and artistic, becomes a little more daring with every outing.
It's the summer of 1808 in this third book and Napoleon's army is tramping through Hanno's Baltic hometown of Lotingen (fictional) on its way to recalcitrant Spain. For three weeks the filth of an army of men and their horses has piled up in the streets. "The French would not clean up after themselves. No Prussian would clean up after the French."
In light of this impasse, "The street was a dark brown carpet, and all above was a dense dark cloud of flies and other insects." This is the mildest of descriptions in a vivid opening chapter. Hanno's very pregnant wife is nearly catatonic with disgust and dread.
When Hanno is called upon by the French to solve the murder of an amber worker up the coast, he strikes a bargain. If he solves the murder the French army cleans Lotingen. Not that he really has any choice.
Amber seems to have worked its strange ways upon the environs of Nordcopp village, where the people are secretive and suspicious. Amber is mined below the surface of the sea - hard and dangerous work. Workers mutilated from blasting eke out a beggarly living in the village. Others drown in the unpredictable sea.
The French covet the stuff to fuel the needs of their army, but amber strikes a patriotic flame in the hearts of Prussians as well as personal greed. The French commander, who revels in affronting Hanno's fastidiousness with his arrogance and personal crudeness, is obsessed with creating a machine to mine amber and free himself of Prussian workers.
The amber workers are rural women, young, strong and hardy, sequestered in camps by the French, who they easily elude. Girls are always disappearing. Many run off with a smuggled cache of amber but some are rumored to have met a more gruesome fate, like the naked, mutilated corpse of the girl found on the beach.
Gregorio (pseudonym of the husband-and-wife team of Michael G. Jacob and Daniella De Gregorio) spins an atmospheric tale of murder and twisted psyches. The mutilations of murdered girls are not for the squeamish but when a girl's corpse turns up in a pigsty, well, the description of this particular pig farm is among the most viscerally revolting things I have ever read. Which is not a criticism. It's disgusting, yes, but really well done. You will feel the miasma of the place coating your tongue.
Anyway, Hanno acquires an assistant, a strange young man with an aristocratic air and Buddhist eccentricities. Is he to be trusted? And more importantly, will Hanno get home for the birth of his fourth child? Will his beloved Helena be safe from the wrath of Prussian zealots who regard Hanno's labors for the French as treasonous?
Fans will find Hanno more appealing than ever, even as Prussia itself seems to sink beneath the mire of French occupation. Newcomers will likely seek out the earlier books, "Critique of Criminal Reason," and "Days of Atonement," recently released in paperback.
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