Yvonne
This is a meme for all you page surfers out there!
TEASER EXTRACT
KINDLE 47%
CHAPTER 20
‘Pleasure and action make the hours seem short’
It is well after mid-night when Max gets home. After they’d handed over the scene to forensics and got their burns checked out, their systems still pumped, they had met with Tobi at Beni’s, a Bierkeller close to the office and had a few drinks to put some distance from the day’s events.
Earlier, he had telephoned the others putting them in the picture and standing them down.
When Max had called Anna, she had been concerned as she knew that an event like this was bound to stir up painful memories. Like so many survivors, Max had spent the entire war either fighting or recovering from wounds. At the start he had been no more than a boy; witnessed and done terrible things, been dragged along in the maelstrom of misdirection and misplaced loyalty, duped by a criminal regime. He, she, and all those with a conscience carried the guilt side-by-side with the trauma and the unresolved conflict of their complicity.
She knew he had played-down the events of the evening and encouraged him to go and blow off some steam with the men that shared so much more than a career.
She waits up, and when the key turns in the door, and he steps in, fatigue etched on his grubby face, she hugs him: the kind only someone special can give.
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If you still need to know more, check out those all important opening lines here
Just to help you get everything into some context – check out the premise below
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ANGEL AVENGER
September 1960. In the Spandauer forest Detectives Max Becker and Bastian Döhl, from the Berlin Kriminalpolizei, find a naked, tortured man tied to a tree.
A cryptic message hangs from his neck.
When another body appears, Max is sure it won’t be the last.
The press dub the killer, Der Waldscharfrichter (The Forest Executioner) and graphic tattoos on the bodies suggest that the victims are Russians with a criminal past.
As more bodies and messages appear, they lead Max and his team to a horrific past event, wounds that run deep in the Berlin psyche, plunging Max into a conflict between his sense of duty and justice.
Author TIM WICKENDEN
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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Ambrosia at ‘The Purple Booker‘. Each week she shares her own teaser lines and invites other bloggers to do the same. So if you have a few moments, why not stop by and see what’s on offer this time, after all, you never know where that next great read is going to come from!
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I think I enjoyed the opening lines that you shared earlier to the ones in this post. Perhaps it’s because I don’t really have any context for this excerpt. It doesn’t seem to flow well for me. Maybe it’s the tense? Still, it sounds like it’s an exciting story and I hope you’re enjoying it.
I’m excited about beginning a new year of reading! Wishing you happiness and good reading in the coming year, too, Yvonne! 🙂
Hi Kelly,
It did take me a couple of chapters reading to get this entire story into some kind of time and place context, so much so, that in fact I went back and re-read the opening sequences for a second time, just to make sure I had it right!
Crime fiction set in post Second World War / Cold War, Berlin, has never crossed my desk before and it has taken me a while to assimilate the violent and suspicious nature of the society in which Max Becker and his team are working.
The narrative detail means that this isn’t one for the faint of heart or stomach, but for me personally, it has been such a rollercoaster read thus far, that I still can’t decide if it is going to be 4 or 5 stars when I am finished. I am just waiting to cram in the last few pages later today!
Personally, as we have both been so ill since Christmas Day, 2020 can’t arrive soon enough, or at least some time when we can sit and seriously reassess where we are heading with the projects we are currently working on. Reading will always figure in my life, but I am not sure to what extent going forward, as it all needs to fit in with the bigger picture!
I wish you and yours a peaceful New Year and I look forward to us sharing more of those ‘must read’ finds 🙂
Hmm. I might consider this for my European reading challenge for 2020. I do already have a book for Germany but that would give me a choice. I shall think on it.
Happy New Year to you, Yvonne. Here’s to another good year of book blogging and good books. I hope 2020 will be a good year for you and yours.
Happy New Year, Cath!
Thanks for all your support over the past year, and indeed, decade! – I really appreciate all your comments and visits 🙂
Given some of the historical context behind this series and the obvious amount of research which author Tim Wickenden has conducted, to ensure both the story and character authenticity, this might work well for your European reading challenge.
Either way, it is still one worth bearing in mind for future reading – unless the last few pages are real disappointment, which I can’t imagine!
I had hoped to include this on in my 2019 challenge figures, but a combination of my SIL being hospitalised NYE, both hubbie and I having some vicious bronchial episode still ongoing, and my VERY nasty brush with norovirus, which laid me low, means that Christmas day was the last time I felt anything like ‘normal’, or like reading!
As they say: ‘things can only get better!’, so here’s to an amazing 2020 🙂
It’s been my pleasure, Yvonne.
I’m so sorry to hear about your sister-in-law and hope she is OK now? There seems to be a nasty bug going round as my youngest daughter came down with it last night. We had our grandson today and again tomorrow so am just hoping he doesn’t get it too and thus ‘us’. Fingers crossed. I do hope you feel better soon. xxx
I am almost back in the land of the living and I sincerely hope that you both manage to avoid it and that your daughter recovers very soon!
When I have time at home to spare and I can’t even bear the thought of picking a book up, then I just know something isn’t right!!
It sounds like an intense thriller, Yvonne. Enjoy it.
Hi Naida,
I am done with this book now, my best book of 2019 and maybe of 2020 too? –
Definitely 5 stars from me!
I had hoped to get my review up by now, however bugs and viruses have laid us both low since Christmas Day and just don’t seem to be going away!
Even opening my next book is a real challenge, but maybe today will be the day when I turn the corner 🙂