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 André 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.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set in 1927 Germany, Rabb's superb sequel to Rosa correlates the advent of talking movies with the rise of Nazism. When Kriminal-Oberkommisar Nikolai Hoffner investigates the apparent suicide of an Ufa film studio executive, the trail leads the Berlin policeman to the sex and drug trade as well as to the National Socialist German Workers Party's local leader, Joseph Goebbels. Working with Helen Coyle, an attractive American talent agent for MGM, Hoffner learns how cutthroat the picture business is. Rumors of films with sound threaten to change the industry. Without sound, all you have is shadow and light, an inventor tells Hoffner. With sound, movies can do a lot more than entertain, as soon to be shown by Nazi propaganda films and newsreels. Rabb's meticulous research brings to life a corrupt society vulnerable to extremism. Well-conceived cameos by director Fritz Lang and actor Peter Lorre add to the intrigue. Author tour. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Starred Review Nazi noir is hot, what with Philip Kerr’s A Quiet Flame, Rebecca Cantrell’s A Trace of Smoke, and Rabb’s second Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner novel all appearing between March and May. Technically, these three novels should be called Weimar noir, as they all focus either entirely or partially on the years between the wars, when the Weimar Republic was hanging by a thread and Hitler’s brownshirts were gathering steam. In 1927, Hoffner is called to the movie studio Ufa to rubber-stamp the suicide of an executive. Except that it’s clearly murder, and Hoffner can’t help poking around. What he finds is a plot of Chandlerian complexity. It starts with a new invention to synchronize sound and action on film, but that’s really a McGuffin of sorts, leading Hoffner to the brownshirts and a plan to rearm Germany. Rabb keeps both balls in the air effectively, introducing a host of real-life figures (Josef Goebbels and legendary director Fritz Lang among them) and dallying with subplots involving Hoffner’s sons (one a brownshirt) and the inspector’s romance with an MGM talent scout, also in search of the sound device. There’s plenty of Weimar decadence on view here, but it’s the fascinating slice of film history overlaid with a sense of the gathering storm that gives the novel its punch. That and Hoffner himself, a noir hero in every way, from his unquenchable thirst for potables to the inevitability with which he finds himself caught in the riptide of history. --Bill Ott