Customer Reviews

WINTER.

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'Winter' tells the story of two generations of a Berlin family, from 1900 to 1945. Since the father is an industrialist who invested in Zeppelins, and one of the sons ends up in the hierarchy of the Gestapo and then the SS, there is plenty going on to hold the reader's interest.

That said, this is not one of Deighton's best. Like an aging singer, Deighton is an author who lost his 'bel canto' somewhere about mid-career.

His early novels -- The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Horse Under Water (and others) were wonderful: witty, mordant, full of details about espionage, Germany, and Germans. Then, somewhere about 1985, he switched publishers to Knopf, and they stopped editing him.

At that point, his books lost their sharp focus and became flabby, improbable, and (essentially) unreadable.

Although 'Winter' is one of Deighton's later books, it contains the back-story on several of the major characters (both German and English) who appeared throughout his early work. For fans of that early work, it's worth reading for that reason alone. As a stand-alone piece, it's still worth reading for anyone who likes Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, or David Downing.