DAVID THOMAS' OSTLAND

Ostland is an ambitious and very powerful novel that reflects the ultimate incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. Beginning with the framework of a crime story, David Thomas has made a brave effort to face what was, at heart, the crime of the last century, and perhaps his book struggles in the same way and for the same reasons we all struggle.

The novel is based on the true story of Georg Hauser, the Berlin detective credited with hunting down the S-Bahn Killer, who eventually was prosecuted as a war criminal. The first act details Hauser's joining the murder squad for the investigation, and its success in finding a serial killer, one who turns out to be impressively mundane. In the second act, Hauser is assigned to the East, the Ostland of the book's title, where he is responsible for the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish problem. The third act, which actually interweaves the other two, involves Hauser's trial, 15 years after the war, 20 after the S-Bahn killer was apprehended, and follows Paula Siebert, the only woman on the investigating unit, and the one assigned to interview Hauser.

The first act sets the scene superbly—as Hauser is shown to be someone without any fanatical calling for the Nazi cause, but with a keen eye toward self-advancement. The very existence of the S-Bahn killer calls the whole German society into question, much as the very existence of the Rostov Ripper was denied in the Soviet Union, a point that was central to Child 44. Thomas creates a fascinating tightrope for Hauser to walk, as he (and his boss) know the killer is likely not a Jew, but must continue to play to the racial prejudices of their superiors, right up to Heydrich himself.

Of course, this turns into stunning shadowing as Hauser becomes immersed in the business of eliminating Jews, watching himself and his fellow civilised Germans turn into serial killers one and all. The story, like the first section, is told by Hauser himself, and where his career as a rookie detective on the country's biggest case is told with an almost naïve taste, the narrative of mass-murder contains not a little self-service, if not pity, alongside its rationalisation. Thomas has also captured the matter-of-fact approach adopted by Hauser to his crimes, something that seems to have been commonplace in the post-war revelations, and which seems almost inevitable—as well even more chilling. The parallel between Hauser and the S-Bahn killer is brought out more fully in this similarity.

It also reflects the self-serving nature of Hauser's testimony as Siebert interviews him. He is a skilled interrogator himself, and to an extent he is playing with her, as much as he plays with the ambiguities he understands all too well from experience. When society makes crime part of its raison d'etre, who is the criminal? Hauser plays with other moral equivalencies—the firebombings of German towns by the RAF, for example, which chill us even as they give us pause. Thomas is doing what Hauser wants to do, make us consider how to mitigate the evil he did.

The novel slows down toward the end. We don't need to know what the actual document Siebert finds in the Soviet archives, that confirms Hauser's guilt, actually is; we have seen enough and we can inuit it from the rest of the story. But knowing it would give us a sense of satisfaction; we want to follow the courtroom more closely, and see justice done.

Similarly, Hauser's falling for a beautiful Jewess and saving her and her siblings might well be true, but it feels too melodramatic, not least in the way he tries to turn it into a virtue to balance against his other acts. And Siebert's ill-fated relationship with her boss, Kraus, seems almost pointless, except it gives Thomas a way to stage a final discussion in which Kraus tries to explain Hauser's behaviour, and that of countless other Germans, under the Nazis, while commenting on Germany's reluctance to punish him and others more harshly. This is the ultimate ambiguity, and it may explain why, in the end, Siebert sends Kraus back to his family, to his place in that society. She, like us, is disappointed not to get more closure, to use the modern term. And that is the final ambiguity, and truth, which Thomas stares down frankly and honestly. His book is perhaps less of a thriller as a result, but it is more chilling, colder and more nightmarish, as a result. One of Hauser's most self-serving statements, which he tells Hannah, the 'mischling' Jewess he saves, is none the less true. She accuses him of being the Devil, and he replies 'I'll tell you something about the Devil I didn't previously understand. He's in Hell, just as much as the people he torments.'

Ostland by David Thomas

Quercus £16.99 ISBN 9781780877365 

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

TOM ROB SMITH'S AGENT 6

Agent 6 is the third, and presumably the last, of Tom Rob Smith's novels about Lev Demidov, the maverick intelligence officer/cop who was the hero of Child 44 and The Secret Speech. It is on the surface an intricately plotted work that risks being over-contrived, ranging from New York City in 1965 to Afghanistan in the Eighties, and back to New York. There is the assassination of a Paul Robseon-ish figure, in which Lev's wife and daughter are involved; there are numerous incidents of the Soviet occupation of Kabul, and there is Lev's ultimate solving of the original killing.

I say contrived because throughout the book the plot threatens to take over, spin out of control, stretch credulity, go all Jason Bournesky on is, especially once it's in Afghanistan, but each time we come back to Smith's real themes, and he pulls us back into the clutches of Demidov's story. IT's risky, in the sense that Demidov's ability to 'beat' the system and continue to function within it is a necessity, but one that threatens to undercut the picture of Soviet society he builds. For example, much is made of the way punishment is visited on the families of those the system decides are enemies—not from vindictiveness but simply because that is the way the system operates. Yet Lev's family is allowed to leave the country and travel to the land of the great enemy, and Lev himself is spared ultimate punishment and sent to Afghanistan instead. Smith is a good enough writer to make sure these things do not challenge our willing suspension of disbelief, but they do gnaw away slightly at the edges of his portrayal of the USSR.

Two things make that portrayal ultimately convincing. One, which will be familiar to anyone who read either of his first two cases, is Demidov himself. To an extent the whole trilogy has been about the battle of an individual's humanity against the collective force of government. Lev is a moving and believeable everyman, a detective as compelling in his obsessive nature and his understanding of people as Harry Bosch or Kurt Wallander. Agent 6 is driven by the original plot, but only picks up steam when Lev takes centre stage. Yet even as the New York story is set up, Lev's human values are already being set against the priorities of the people who represent the two warring systems, the dialect versis the human. In Lev's case, this inevitably boils down to a question of betrayal of trust; a prologue set in 1950 shows us that dilemma acted out with Lev on the wrong side, which will be reflected ironically when his decision not to intrude on his daughter's privacy leaves him unable to protect her.

Which leads to the second reason is compelling, and that is the careful way Smith draws out the affinties between the two sides. The FBI's hounding of the black folk singer Jesse Austin may not be as fatal as the attentions of the KGB, but it is every bit as capricious, vindicative, and inhumane--although Smith does hedge his bets slightly by showing the FBI agent villain as somewhat of a bad apple, whereas he's clear about the institutional evil of his Soviet counterparts--except, as with Lev, they aren't. Which may well be the strongest way to make his point about the system.

And as Smith outlines the realities of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan it is hard not to recognise the distinct parallels between their Vietnam and the current Afghan mess in which the US and UK have mired themselves, and which has now gone on for a year more than the Soviet's. Smith may be too careful, in the sense of setting up the reminder that the Mujahideen the US backed to irritate the Soviets opened the door for the Taliban, and eventually themselves spawned Al Queda. He doesn't try to spell it out, and shouldn't need to, but sometimes you feel he's aware there may be many who simply won't see it.

It comes to a moving end, though I suppose Lev's fate could be considered somewhat open ended, in the sense that he's been a survivor, and sometimes an unlikely one, throughout the series. But it is more powerful to take the book's climax as it is stated, with human values and relationships triumphing even in the face of the cruelest and ultimate institutionalised repression. In that sense, Lev Davidov is a true everyman hero, who manages to transcend the mechanics of his own stories; Tom Rob Smith's first detective creation is both memorable and meaningful.

Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith, Simon & Schuster £16.99 ISBN 9781847375674

ANDREA MARIA SCHENKEL'S ICE COLD

Ice Cold covers familiar ground in an unusual manner. Andrea Schenkel's short novel details the stories of a number of victims of a serial killer in 1930s Berlin, then sets them against the confession of their killer, Josef Kalteis. Meanwhile, interwoven with these tales is the story of Kathie, a young country girl who comes to Munich entranced by the freedom and excitement of the city, but soon finds herself falling into a sort of desperate life of casual amateur prostitution. Inevitably, her path and Kalteis' are doomed to cross.

The originality of this approach hides its familiarity. If Kathie's path is reminiscent of Louise Brooks' Lulu, the scene with two cycling brothers neatly details not only the sense of a price fallen women must pay, which forms the core of much serial killer fiction, but also the very real innocence behind Kathie's 'fall'. She is not, like the fornicating babysitters of modern horror movies, shown as somehow inviting her demise, rather her simple desperation aimed at finding a place to sleep is set against the powerlessness which brings out a very different sort of response from Kalteis. But the sense of inevitable doom, which recalls Murnau and many other films of the period, is engineered delicately and precisely.

Kalteis seems based, loosely, on Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf vampire, with one crucial difference. The Weimar era was Germany's first golden age of serial killers; Schenkel's setting the killings in the Nazi era articulates them against a different backdrop, one in which female sexuality, often seen as the provocation for the Weimar serial killers, is less a matter of modern empowerment as a reaction to the relative lack of economic power within the new system. In other words, an echo of the particular story of Kathie described above. Like Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, Schenkel's setting is within a system which refuses to allow for the existence of serial killers within it, though Schenkel doesn't actually make much of the ulitmate ambiguity of this system's dedication to its own serial killing on a far larger scale. But her portrayal of Kurteis, pathetically almost unaware of his own actions, is also familiar; it was set out by Colin Wilson, among others, in his study of Kurten, and shows a marked sociopathology which perhaps suggests something more universal within the Germany of the time.

Serial killers reflected Hannah Arendt's famed 'banality of evil' just as surely as the Eichmanns of the Nazi death machine, and perhaps it is here where Schenkel's implied parallel is most accurate. Though this interpretation would be easy to miss. There is a difficulty in that, interpreted through our modern victim culture, Kalteis becomes a stock villain, an abusive man, and this more personal approach is something reinforced by the translation. I cannot say how some of the speech, not just Kalteis' but other characters' as well, is meant to be presented, but I assume it was written in some sort of German slang. It is translated into a kind of mockney right out of a 1930s movie. I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but the effect is to recall Hitchock's The Lodger, say, not Pabst's Lulu, removing the sense of temptress and guilt from Kathie, which is good, but somehow removing from Kalteis a general sense being a force within an evil world, his Nazi context if you will, and place him instead as a mundane evil everyman.

The strong point of Ice Cold is that it is, indeed, ice cold (the German title was Kalteis, but this one works far better). We build a certain amount of sympathy for Kathie, as we follow her story knowng she must be doomed, but there is a palpable lack of horror, of feeling, from most of the characters; some understated expressions of loss, but mostly a certain sense of acceptance of this unnatural violence. As if it is already their world. And perhaps this was Schenkel's point after all, using the idea of the serial killer and the sex murder to crystallize something more horrific on a far larger scale, an acceptance of a slightly twisted world, which became far more than slightly twisted. It's a lot to read into, indeed to ask, of such a compact mood piece, but I think it works on that level as well as that of a thriller.

Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel translated by Anthea Bell Quercus, £9.99 ISBN 9781847245656