{"id":7038,"date":"2018-01-29T06:30:46","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T11:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7038"},"modified":"2018-01-28T18:18:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-28T23:18:21","slug":"stasi-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7038","title":{"rendered":"****Stasi Child"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Berlin

photo: Department of Defense<\/p><\/div>\n

By David Young, narrated by Julia Barrie \u2013 In a sense every person in this novel is a candidate to be the \u201cStasi Child\u201d of this book\u2019s title, so pervasive is the influence, the spying, and the danger posed by the Stasi, the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic. This is Cold War fiction at its most chilling.<\/p>\n

Not even Karin M\u00fcller, the book\u2019s main protagonist, a detective in the murder squad of East Berlin\u2019s Kripo, is exempt. (The Kripo is the nickname for the Kriminalpolizei.) In fact, she is very much in the Stasi\u2019s sights for several reasons. Closest to home, her math teacher husband has been fraternizing with \u201cfascist elements,\u201d risking a spell in jail, or worse. Already he was sent for a time to teach at a remote youth detention center as a warning. One he hasn\u2019t heeded.<\/p>\n

Mysteriously, detective M\u00fcller has been called on to investigate the death of a teenage girl whose body was found in a cemetery at the foot of the Berlin Wall. Dead bodies near the wall were not uncommon in winter 1975, when the story is set, as would-be escapees were shot on sight, but it appears this girl was shot in the back while attempting to escape into <\/em>East Germany, not out of it.<\/p>\n

The case is a minefield of political elements, as well. M\u00fcller is told that Stasi agent Klaus J\u00e4ger will actually be in charge of the investigation, though M\u00fcller and her Unterleutnant Werner Tilsner will do the work. Moreover, their remit is confined to discovering the girl\u2019s identity, not seeking to find out who murdered her.<\/p>\n

Whether the Stasi knows they are violating the terms of their assignment, whether they know she and Tilsner have been indiscreet, whether her husband is in jeopardy\u2014everything could become a threat. Author David Young is an expert at ramping up these tensions, with one or two too many twists and turns nearing the end.<\/p>\n

Interwoven with the chapters about the investigation are first-person chapters, set seven months earlier, told from the point of view of Irma Behrendt, a fifteen-year-old inmate at the youth work camp where M\u00fcller\u2019s husband was sent. She dreams of escape and wants to take her best friend with her. It would be dangerous, of course, but desperation breeds courage. Eventually, the two narratives converge. Irma\u2019s tale has been, all along, vital backstory.<\/p>\n

With a female protagonist and first-person narrator, Julia Barrie was chosen to narrate the audiobook. Perhaps to give the many male characters distinctive audio personalities in her lower registers, she pitched Karin\u2019s and Irma\u2019s voices rather high. That sort of works for Irma\u2014she\u2019s young, after all\u2014but not for Karin. She sounds too light, too immature, not forceful enough to be heading a murder squad. A benefit of audio is that Barrie handled all those multisyllabic German words with admirable ease.
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By David Young, narrated by Julia Barrie \u2013 In a sense every person in this novel is a candidate to be the \u201cStasi Child\u201d of this book\u2019s title, so pervasive is the influence, the spying, and the danger posed by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****Stasi Child - The bad old Cold War days in the GDR. Chilly, engrossing crime thriller.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,40,268,126,359,32],"tags":[1229,1230,1227,1228,1226],"class_list":["post-7038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-fiction","category-politics","category-reading-2","category-review","category-thriller","tag-berlin-wall","tag-cold-war","tag-david-young","tag-german-democratic-republic","tag-stasi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Pw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7040,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038\/revisions\/7040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}