Patience rewarded.

I was drawn to Ariana Franklin's second novel, City of Shadows, mostly due to its setting. The image I have of 1920s Berlin is mostly a combination of decadent nightclubs a la Cabaret and sleek modernist designs from the Bauhaus. But the Berlin of Franklin's novel has a definite dark underbelly, populated by characters desperate to survive in a city that cannot feed its own, in spite of the glittering clubs. Esther Solomonova sees both sides of the city, working for a flamboyant club owner while still recovering from the nightmares of the Russian pograms that left her scarred both physically and emotionally. When her boss, Prince Nick, latches onto a mysterious woman in a local insane hospital who claims to the be the last of the Russian royal family, Esther is given the task of molding her into a believable princess. But with the arrival of Anna Anderson/Anastasia Romanov, Esther finds that the ghosts of her past are not far behind.

Neither, apparently, are the ghosts of Anna's past--and soon more are added. First, the club matron is brutally murdered, then a cabaret showgirl. Esther suspects that anyone with connections to Anna is in the killer's sights, but it is not until Inspector Schmidt of the Berlin police takes the case that Esther's theory is investigated. But as Berlin throws itself into the rising power of National Socialism, the prestige of claiming Grand Duchess Anastasia is a powerful political coup--and at odds with Schmidt and Esther's search for justice.

City of Shadows is a little different from most other suspense novels, in that it took quite a while for the story to really get underway. Franklin uses much of the first portion of the book to create a lush portrait of Berlin and the characters that inhabit it, making the going a little slow at first. But the care Franklin pays in setting the stage pays off in the second half of the book, where the mystery and suspense really start to shift into gear. The depth of characters give that suspense much more of a bite, as I was much more invested in the characters, really caring about the injustices paid to them, and struggling to understand how some could turn to the hateful message of the Nazis.

Anna Anderson was a real person, and many of the events in the book actually happened as Franklin recounts them. But it is as much the nuanced portrait of a city on a brink that gives City of Shadows an authenticity that I sometimes find is missing from many mystery novels. It took a little while to warm up, but I'm glad I stuck with the book as I found myself getting drawn into it more and more. By the end, I was reading at a breakneck pace, hoping it wouldn't end.