Book Review-Older Books 19

Garden of Beasts, a Novel of Berlin 1936; by Jeffery Deaver.  Published by Simon & Schuster, July 2004, 404 pgs.

The story begins in New York, 1936.  Paul Schumann is a mob “button man”, hit man in today’s vocabulary.  He is known for his caution, skill, and determination to only “tough off” those who he considers “God’s Mistakes”.  He may have done jobs for Segal and Lansky, but no one seems to know for sure.  Then in the course of his latest job, he is caught.  When he is caught, he is given the chance to start over, and it’s not the police who want to give him this chance.  Paul is taken to a government office and offered two choices; prison or taking a job and starting his life over. 

This job will take him to Berlin to the 1936 Olympics.  Suddenly, he is a traveling sports writer, on the boat with the US team.  It is Paul’s job to halt the progress of Germany’s rearmament after World War I.  In so doing he takes a room in the Tiergarten, also known as the garden of beasts, due to recent beatings of any citizens who may have any feelings different from the Fuhrers.  Hitler may seem crazy to some, but he surrounds himself with those who hold his dreams together.  One of those men is Reinhard Ernst, and he is the man who is orchestrating this rearmament.  Not only has he devised a way to rebuild the German Navy, but he is also in collusion with psychiatrists to study ways to determine what soldiers can and will handle mass exterminations.  And there are killings that indicate that the German’s have been putting this study to the test.  Paul’s assignment is to hunt down and kill Ernst, and after reading about the “Waltham study”, Paul knows this is a man to eliminate.

These are fictional characters, but the attitudes, and cultural and political beliefs in the United States and Germany hold true.  Paul is hired and led to believe one thing only to find out that one of his supporters is supporting Hitler’s rise.  The book demonstrates the followers and opposition on both sides of the Atlantic.  It shows how many were unaware of Hitler’s pure evil, and those who would have still supported him.  Jeffery Deaver delivers many plot twists and turns, and just when you think you know what’s coming next, you realize it’s just the opposite.

This book is a little slow to begin with, but quickly picks up speed and moves along. 

T.G. Stanton