Bernard Cucchi Ordre des livres

Berlin, between the two world wars. When an executive at the renowned Ufa film studios is found dead floating in his office bathtub, it falls to Nikolai Hoffner, a chief inspector in the Kriminalpolizei, to investigate. With the help of Fritz Lang (the German director) and Alby Pimm (leader of the most powerful crime syndicate in Berlin), Hoffner finds his case taking him beyond the world of film and into the far more treacherous landscape of Berlin's sex and drug trade, the rise of Hitler's Brownshirts (the SA), and the even more astonishing attempts by onetime monarchists to rearm a post-Versailles Germany. Being swept up in the case are Hoffner's new lover, an American talent agent for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and his two sons: Georg, who has dropped out of school to work at Ufa, and Sascha, his angry, older son, who, unknown to his father, has become fully entrenched in the new German Workers Party as the aide to its Berlin leader, Joseph Goebbels. What a spellbinding novel "Shadow and Light" is, and what a novelist Jonathan Rabb has become! When we last met Hoffner, it was 1919, and he had taken on the disappearance and death of Rosa Luxembourg in "Rosa," a novel the critic John Leonard hailed as "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and Andre Malraux." "Shadow and Light" is equally brilliant and atmospheric, and even harder to put down or shake off. Like Joseph Kanon or Alan Furst, Rabb magically fuses a smart, energetic narrative with layers of fascinating, vividly documented history. The result is a stunning historical thriller, created by a writer to celebrate--and contend with.

"Amateurs de puzzles à l'heure du thé, de petits salons anglais, de vieilles dames facétieuses et détectives de temps à autre, soyez comblés : l'ineffable Miss Silver de Patricia Wentworth nous revient, efficace et fine mouche, suspense et dramatisation en prime ! Enfoncée, la brave Miss Marple d'Agatha Christie, tant les aventures de sa collègue sont vives et préfigurent déjà les romans d'une Patricia Highsmith. Un régal !" Christian Robin, Le Courrier français

Marchand d'art et nouveau riche aussi avide de reconnaissance sociale que dépourvu de scrupules, Arthur Rainbow fait l'unanimité contre lui dès qu'il s'installe dans la tranquille vallée du Middlehope. " Il doit partir ", décrète le tout jeune Bossie, génie en herbe et soliste du chœur de l'église de Saint-Eata, traduisant le sentiment général qui agite la petite communauté. Aussi, quand on retrouve le corps sans vie de Rainbow au pied du clocher de l'église, personne ne semble s'en étonner ou le regretter. Pour sa toute dernière enquête, George Felse, récemment promu chef du C.I.D., est particulièrement perplexe, car si les suspects sont légion, l'animosité envers le personnage ne saurait tout expliquer. Et voilà qu'un soir Bossie est victime d'un mystérieux chauffard...