The Informer

December 14, 2009
Set in 1930 Berlin, this fine novel from Nova (The Good Son
) smoothly combines crime and politics. Armina Treffen, who works for the serious crimes section of the Berlin police department and has a successful track record catching serial killers, goes after a fiend who strangles his female victims and leaves their abused bodies in the Tiergarten. Treffen’s investigation is interwoven with the story of the title character, Gaelle, a 22-year-old prostitute with an alluring facial scar from a car accident, and her 16-year-old pimp, Felix. A mysterious gentleman, Bruno Hauptmann (not to be confused with the man executed for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby), recruits Gaelle to pass along any information about what, say, the Communists are up to that she might pick up on the job. While those expecting a conventional police procedural may be disappointed, the author’s evocative portrait of Weimar Germany and sophisticated portrayals of the lead characters will satisfy most readers.

January 1, 2010
Chaotic historical mystery from Nova (Cruisers, 2004, etc.), who continues his move toward more heavily plotted work.

The setting, credibly evoked, is ominous, sinister Weimar Berlin in 1930, amid street fighting and brutal political maneuvering by both the Left and the soon-to-be triumphant Nazis. Gaelle, a young woman disfigured by a scar from a car crash, has learned to make her living as a prostitute not by hiding her injury but by capitalizing on the damaged allure it lends her. She becomes the sought-after companion of several powerful figures, and in a city where the only commerce as reliable as the sex trade is information trafficking, she learns to play every side against the others. This is a dangerous business, perhaps even a fatal one, as Gaelle is well aware. But she's attended by another maimed soul, a lame teen named Felix who's determined to protect her from the dangers that lurk everywhere. Meanwhile a serial rapist and killer has been preying on young women, several of them acquaintances of Gaelle, and a female detective named Armina comes to her, as so many have before, for tidbits of gossip and inside knowledge. Embattled Armina, Berlin's only female detective, is the novel's most memorable character, but Nova buries her beneath hackneyed subplots that include a mystical love match and a battle of wills with a corrupt, amoral boss.

The author's formidable literary gifts are only occasionally on view in an overly ambitious psychological thriller that provides little persuasive psychology and few thrills.

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February 1, 2010
Nova, known for challenging literary fiction, turns here to a thriller set in Berlin in 1930, as the Weimar Republic slouches toward its own particular Armageddon. Like Philip Kerr, Jonathan Rabb, and others, Nova finds in Berlin before the war the perfect breeding ground for noira decadent society slipping deeper into the muck while a repressive alternative prepares to take control. Nova focuses his story on two women, one a detective searching for a serial killer, the other a special kind of Weimar-era prostitute, a Gravelstone (a woman with a deformity that possesses erotic appeal). The prostitute, Gaelle, is also an informer, selling tidbits of information to all who askCommunists, Nazis, the police. The cop, Armina, feels personally violated by the killings, all of prostitutes, and is determined to solve the case, despite the encouragement of her boss to leave it alone. Novas main concern is the complex interplay among his characters, but he develops the suspense nicely, too, flashing forward to Berlin in 1945 for a peculiar but effective finale, the citys post-Armageddon rubble providing the inevitable flip side to Weimars forced gaiety. An entrancing mood piece.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)