Michael Best

A mix of fiction and fact. The factual story of Josef Mengele's life in hiding, after his escape from a collapsing Nazi Germany, but often using the fictional conceit of imagining what Mengele himself was thinking.

It destroys any of the more glamorous portrayals of Mengele's life on the run, whilst laying bare the extent of the support network he relied upon to fund his life and keep him hidden.

A short book which I feel was well worth the read.

My rating is for the edition and not the stories. I have the Penguin version and the translation is archaic and, at times, barely comprehensible. My ebook version also appears to be an OCR scan which is fully of typical OCR typo errors, it also lacks coding to link to the very many footnotes.

The Pushkin edition is a modern translation and works wonderfully for me. It is a shame the Pushkin edition misses out on the other short stories included in the Penguin edition, as these add a lot of flesh on the bones of Babel's own character and personality.

An ok thriller ruined by the entirely unnecessary sex scenes and the general sexual objectification of the female characters.

This is not the book I was expecting (hoping for).

Save for the penultimate chapter, I found most of it to be quite boring and unenlightening. On the other hand, it really helped me fall asleep.

DNF.

To be read slowly, relished and cherished.

I was a little anxious when I saw that this book returned to within a few years of the period in which book 1 is set.

As it turned out, I need not have worried. I blooming loved this tale which, in fact is something of a prequel to book 1.

An ok storyline. Some strange dialogue at times. A deeply frustrating (and unnecessary) habit of the author to throw in phrases, or even whole sentences of dialogue in Spanish and then translate them into English - presumably to remind the simple reader that we were in Spain and the characters were all speaking Spanish.

DNF

Generously rated at 3, but I am not tempted to read any others.

Nearly a 1. There were parts of this book I rather liked but, overall, I thought it was something of a mess which increasingy fell apart.

Be aware, there is no real conclusion at the end of this book - it is merely set-up for the next in the series.

2.5 would be more accurate. I enjoyed the first two books in this series but the subsequent two have disappointed. The history in this book is enjoyable, the crime/mystery plot rather convoluted and weak, and the continuing recipe explanations of various dishes is now annoying.

I already have the next in the series but reading it is not an enticing prospect.

Less a thriller, more a deeply unsettling psychological ride in the head of a killer.

Badly dated tosh, and not even good tosh.

This is a DNF for me.

This is my fourth Mock and I have been liking the series less with each book. Enough is enough.

I am not quite 50% through this book and it has been such an unpleasant struggle - my feeling is that the translation may not be helping, but that is not the cause of the heavy, plodding style.

Whilst I enjoyed this book, it is clearly hampered by the limited written data available and the fact that none of the key participants is alive to supplement the lacking data (what did he do all those years in New Zealand?; what did the various women in his life make of his unfaithful behaviour?). I also found the flow a bit disjointed, not helped by points being repeated in separate chapters, or a footnote telling a tale and then the main text tells the same tale.

I think it was the author's obvious fascination for (and, perhaps bewilderment of) Maurice which overcame my reservations about the book.

(Should be 2.5)

I think I liked the idea of this book more than its execution. It rather left me as cold as a Leningrad winter.

I found this to be a bundle of ideas in a rather one-dimensional story.

The first part in a series, for which I have no desire to investigate further.

I have classed this book as “funny” but, in truth, I am not sure I laughed even once.

I really enjoyed Part One of this book but Part Two was such a slog.

Perhaps a slightly generous 4 star, but I did enjoy the series and I felt this book was my favourite.

Much modern SF rather disappoints me, so it has been a pleasant surprise to find a series which has held me throughout.

Though this is promoted as an Inspector Erlendur novel, Erlendur is not in it. It is about his colleague, Sigurdur Oli.

Well, not actually about Erlendur.

This feels as though the author wanted to get inside the head of one of his side characters - Erlendur's colleague Sigurdur Oli.

Not the best in the series, but it drew me in.

Dated and generally uninteresting collection of SF short stories.