Paul travels to Germany, takes a room in a boarding house near the Tiergarten -- the huge park in central Berlin but also, literally, the "Garden of Beasts" -- and begins his hunt. The next forty-eight hours are a feverish cat-and-mouse chase, as Paul stalks Ernst through Berlin while a dogged Berlin police officer and the entire Third Reich apparatus search frantically for the American.

Garden of Beasts features a cast of perfectly realized locals, Olympic athletes and senior Nazi officials -- some real, some fictional. With hairpin plot twists, the reigning "master of ticking-bomb suspense" (People) plumbs the nerve-jangling paranoia of prewar Berlin and steers the story to a breathtaking and wholly unpredictable ending.

Amazon.com Review
Jeffery Deaver's Garden of Beasts introduces anti-hero Paul Schumann, a notorious rubout man for the New York Mafia known for his cold and professional approach to his job. But the jig is up when he is duped by high-ranking feds who give him a choice--prison or one more impossible job: assassinate the man who's running Hitler's plan for rearming Germany. The hard-nosed German-American lands on the streets of Berlin where immediately the best-laid plans of the United States Government go awry. Schumman finds himself in a city living in fear, tracked by Berlin's best homicide detective. As the intricate chase wears on, both men will discover that the greatest evil is the ascendant Nazi party.

Deaver's novel, equal parts noir thriller and historical extrapolation, is a page-turner that offers a twisting visceral experience of the tension in Berlin during that fateful summer. He draws sympathetic portraits of everyday Germans caught between duty to country and their consciences. Into this mix, Deaver drops his coldly dangerous hitman who brawls with brownshirts, chums with Olympic athletes, collaborates with criminals, fraternizes with poets, and discovers the hero inside his hardened soul. --Jeremy Pugh

Amazon.com Interview
When starting a new book by author Jeffery Deaver, expect to have the wool pulled over your eyes. His plots twist and turn and juke and jive like no others, never ending as expected and always including a jaw-dropping plot development. His latest effort, Garden of Beasts, is no exception. Amazon.com caught up with Deaver to discuss plotting, characters, and the perils of soap opera acting.

This story started off as a two star effort at best, ended as a four star offering hence the three stars I gave it.

I'm not sure why I endured through the almost childish early part of the story. I guess I'm a sucker for WW II novels, especially if they involve intrigue.

Staged against the backdrop of the preparation for the 1936 Olympics, the protagonist Paul Schumann, is a hitman with a heart of gold. He only rubs out people who God mistakenly put on earth. As he tries to carry out his assignment, assassinating Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of Germany's military build-up, a deed which will clear him of all his past crimes, he is constantly put in the position of making choices that cause him problems.

Throughout the book, he is pursued by Willi Kohl, Germany's premier detective, as a murder suspect. He also becomes a target of the entire German police establishment when it is discovered what he's in Germany to do. He also manages to fall in love with his landlady and hook up with a con-man who saves his life on more than one occasion.

As always with Deaver's books, the plot has a great number of twists and surprises. I would suggest that the plotting is the real strength of this story and wanting to know "what happens next" is what kept me going early in the book.

Much like the background of a painting, the evils of Nazism are portrayed as a never-ending theme. In the end, we discover who are really the "good guys" and the "bad guys" but it's not always clear in the middle of the book.

I cannot unreservedly recommend a book of 542 pages as a quick read but once you get into it, I suspect you will want to finish it quickly, if for no other reason, than to unravel the plot.