{"id":7174,"date":"2018-04-04T08:37:27","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T12:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7174"},"modified":"2018-04-04T08:37:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T12:37:27","slug":"a-darker-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7174","title":{"rendered":"***A Darker State"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"car

photo: Lothar Massmann, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By David Young \u2013<\/strong>Life in East Germany in the mid-1970s is the true subject of David Young\u2019s intriguing series<\/a> of police procedurals-cum-political-thrillers, and dark it is.<\/p>\n

Oberleutnant Karin M\u00fcller in East Berlin\u2019s Kriminalpolizei\u2014considered by some overpromoted to that post\u2014has been inexplicably promoted again while on maternity leave. Now a major, she’s being put in charge of a team that will oversee investigations of high-profile murders anywhere in the country, murders that might \u201cprove embarrassing to the Republic.\u201d In other words, investigations that inevitably will put her on a collision course with the Ministry for State Security, the dreaded East German Secret Police. The Stasi.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller isn\u2019t eager to cut short her maternity leave. But, as inducement, her boss reveals that a spacious apartment will be hers if she accepts the new job assignment\u2014a giant step up from the tiny quarters where she\u2019s living with her infant twins, their father, and her grandmother. And there\u2019s the not inconsiderable inducement that she\u2019d be working again with Werner Tilsner who also has been promoted. M\u00fcller accepts. Thank goodness. Now we can move on with the story and leave behind awkward references to the series\u2019 earlier books.<\/p>\n

Their first case arises when Tilsner is summoned to where a young man\u2019s body has been found. The body has the marks of restraints and, it turns out, an abnormally high amount of testosterone in his blood. He\u2019s only the first. The roadblocks that M\u00fcller and Tilsner encounter as their investigation proceeds have the machinations of the Stasi written all over them.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Jonas Schmidt, the pedantic Kriminaltechniker who aids M\u00fcller and Tilsner with the forensic aspects of their investigations is in an increasingly sour mood. Trouble at home. Schmidt\u2019s teenage son Markus has taken up with friends his parents deem unsuitable. Markus\u2019s new friends are homosexual, and you suspect he\u2019s being set up for something dangerous, even if he doesn\u2019t see it. While East Germany legalized homosexuality in 1968, changing the law has not changed prejudices.<\/p>\n

As in his first book, Stasi Child<\/em>, Young tells part of the story from a victim\u2019s first-person point of view, in this case Markus\u2019s, starting a few months before M\u00fcller and Tilsner begin their new assignment. It\u2019s a clever way to introduce backstory, since all crimes have some sort of history.<\/p>\n

While the time shifts were mostly easy to follow, what would add to my understanding of the narrative would be a map showing the places the story takes place. Frequently, M\u00fcller is torn by late-night calls to go off somewhere, leaving the twins with her grandmother once again. I had no sense of whether these places are a few miles or a few hundred miles distant.<\/p>\n

In an afterword, Young writes that he became interested in East Germany when he arranged a tour for a band he was in. \u201cGerman venues loved booking UK bands.\u201d Luckily for us (and for Young and his fellow musicians), they did not meet the same fate as the British band Pearl Harbor in the Belgian thriller Back Up<\/em>, reviewed here recently<\/a>, in which all the band members are murdered in the first eighty pages!<\/p>\n

A longer version of this review appeared on crimefictionlover.com<\/a>. <\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By David Young \u2013Life in East Germany in the mid-1970s is the true subject of David Young\u2019s intriguing series of police procedurals-cum-political-thrillers, and dark it is. Oberleutnant Karin M\u00fcller in East Berlin\u2019s Kriminalpolizei\u2014considered by some overpromoted to that post\u2014has been … 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":"***A Darker State - another in David Young's series about East Germany in the 1970s and the machinations of the dreaded secret police.","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":[52,54,632,126,32],"tags":[1287,128,678],"class_list":["post-7174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-police","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-east-germany","tag-history","tag-murder"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1RI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7174","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=7174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7176,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7174\/revisions\/7176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}