Complex thriller in 1943 Berlin!

Some Murders in Berlin by Karen Robards    

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Heartstopping thriller set in Berlin in 1943. Denmark had just surrendered to the Nazis when Professor Elin Lund, a forensic psychiatrist, from Copenhagen is directed by Nazi command to go to Berlin to investigate a serial killer. Blonde women have been found murdered in identical situations.

Elin can’t disobey. She’s hiding a secret, or two. She takes two fellow academics with her as consultants, members of the Danish Resistance, who need to get out of Denmark. Pia is a photographer and Jens is a brilliant mathematician. They are members of the Danish Resistance.

She is to work the stern CID detective, Kriminalinspektor Kurt Schneider.

It turns out Kurt’s a man with his own set of secrets. I really came to appreciate the man Kurt is.

Convinced the killer has some attachment to the police, Elin methodically follow all the evidence to build a picture of their man. 

Elin has always hated being in Berlin. Her mother, a prominent psychiatrist, had been killed in a hit and run accident when Elin had been a young girl. (More revelations!) Going back there was hard, leaving her son was harder. The search for the seriously deranged killer becomes more dangerous as the pair infiltrate his lair and upset his regime. Elin receives threatening notes from the killer. The pair are beset on all sides. It turns out  the killer seems to be targeting young women of the Lebensborn Society—women who will give birth to pure Aryan babies.

Add to this Kurt had displeased General Reinhard Heydrich, part of Hitler’s the heirachy, He'd been part of the bloody, failed invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa. Kurt had returned wounded by shrapnel blasts and with and shell shock. Elin is made very nervous by General Haupt who’d requested her presence. 

The developing relationship between these two wounded people is a thing of delight. 

A spine tingling thriller that leads into the jackals’ den that was the Berlin under the Third Reich.

A Harlequin Trade ARC via NetGalley.                                              

Many thanks to the author and publisher.