Books about Berlin between the wars, during the Nazi era and into the Cold War clearly engage readers and have a great following. I have read a lot in the last few years. In the hands of a great writer the city and its history provide a wonderful backdrop for intrigue and excitement. The likes of Philip Kerr, Joseph Kanon and Robert Harris manage to weave the city into their novels as an extra character and when you visit the city you can instantly place yourself in Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz or Prinz-Albrecht-Straße as they portrayed them.

In Betrayal in Berlin we meet an English physicist (John), about to start a two year fellowship at the Friedrich Wilhelm university, who is recruited by the British intelligence service to keep an eye on German advances which could be purposed for military purposes. The story begins in 1925, with the Weimar Republic just beginning to creak at the edges and a man call Adolf Hitler starting to agitate with his new National Socialist Party.

I started my review by reflecting on the use of Berlin as a backdrop to great thrillers and that’s an important theme to return to. Betrayal in Berlin doesn’t manage to do that. Whilst the author tries to capture the permissive atmosphere of the city, I didn’t get a feeling that I was actually there in any sense. The characters were well thought out and their back stories were concisely laid out. The plot kept moving along, but the dialogue didn’t always feel naturalistic.In choosing to have John fall in love with a Jewish woman the author made the decision to go down a rather hackneyed road which I didn’t feel was really necessary. There are also some phrases which felt clunky (for example referring to a building as an example of early twentieth century architecture wasn’t right when the scene was set in 1925). Similarly the idea that university librarians would search coats and bags of library visitors and would prohibit anyone from making a copy of published research in the public domain was lacking credibility.

I liked the overall concept, but the plot was slow to get going. I think that it’s fine to spend some time on building up the characters if it is to be a character-led story, but the plot suffered from a lack of action in the first half. A lot of possibilities were discarded. John is a physicist but might as well have been a cabby for all the physics he did. Then he was s spy but not for long. Women jumped in and out of his bed in pretty much every chapter in the middle of the book, but this did little to advance the plot significantly. These niggles all added up which left me feeling rather underwhelmed overall. There isn’t any central plot that holds the book together and John doesn’t seem to develop as a character- his experiences don’t change or shape him. His stiff upper lip is formidable and whether he is burying his father, being bombed, condemning a spy to be hanged or in bed with his girlfriend, his reactions are similar to buying a pint in the pub.

Thank you to NetGalley for making an advance copy of this book available for review. The opinions expressed above are entirely my own, following a full read of the novel.