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    The Second Son by Jonathan Rabb

The Second Son: Book summary and reviews of The Second Son by Jonathan Rabb

The Second Son

The Second Son
The Berlin Trilogy #3
by Jonathan Rabb
Published in USA Feb 2011,
304 pages.

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The Second Son Summary

On the eve of Hitler's Olympics, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, a half Jew, has been forced out of the Kriminalpolizei. Luckily, Hoffner's focus is elsewhere. His son Georg is missing in Spain, swept up in the sudden outbreak of the civil war. He has already lost Sascha, his elder son, who is fully entrenched in the Nazi regime. But Georg is not what he appears to be, and when Hoffner discovers this, he is determined to save the one son he can.

The Second Son is the eagerly awaited final installment in Jonathan Rabb's Berlin trilogy, set between the two world wars. In Harper’s Magazine, John Leonard called the first, Rosa, "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and André Malraux." The second, Shadow and Light (2009), garnered rave reviews - in The Washington Post, Wendy Smith praised its "atmosphere" and "brilliantly plotted narrative." Now, nearly ten years after the events of Shadow and Light, Hoffner finds himself tossed into the chaos that is Spain - where he quickly meets anarchists, Soviet and British secret agents, and a female doctor called Mila Pera - as he follows a trail of clues left by Georg.

The Second Son Reviews

"Rabb's gripping conclusion to his Berlin noir trilogy...fans of Alan Furst and Philip Kerr will be rewarded." - Publishers Weekly

"The best-selling success of Furst and Kerr has shown there is an audience for 1930s noir novels, and Rabb's well-written historical thriller will not disappoint." - Library Journal

"The well-researched Civil War details elbow aside the family drama, to the novel's detriment." - Kirkus Reviews

The information about The Second Son shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.

The Second Son Reader Reviews

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Rated 5 of 5 of 5 by Eric Bangor
Great
Loved this book. Great atmosphere. Great story. I'll be reading the other two in the trilogy.

Jonathan Rabb Author Biography

Jonathan Rabb grew up knowing he would be an academic. The son and grandson (on both sides) of historians, Rabb’s world shook at its very core when he opted to try his hand at political theory. As an undergraduate at Yale, Rabb divided his time among Locke and Hobbes and Hegel while spending his more reckless hours singing with the Whiffenpoofs and galloping across stage in such roles as Harry the Horse and a perfectly bean-poled Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. He even went so far as to make his living his first years out of college as an actor in New York before settling on a PhD program at Columbia.

Somehow, though, that was not to be. While in Germany researching the very compelling and very obscure seventeenth-century theorist Samuel von Pufendorf...

... Full Biography

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