City of Shadows starts off well, but then the middle and latter part of the first half really bog down with a lot of minutia. Granted it's not easy to write anything particularly cheery about life during the hyperinflationary times of the Weimar Republic, but there's really not much action in that section either. The second half of the book really takes off though, and the ending is fantastic!
The main characters are well developed and have enough internal dialogue to flesh them out, but not so much that you become bored with thier endless introspection. The author really brought in a lot of realism for the time and place. The political environment is as big a "character" as any other in this. The tensions between the various political factions and Jews, gays, immigrants and communists are all played out against a backdrop of Hitler's rise to power, and the pursuit of a shadowy killer.
The main characters are well developed and have enough internal dialogue to flesh them out, but not so much that you become bored with thier endless introspection. The author really brought in a lot of realism for the time and place. The political environment is as big a "character" as any other in this. The tensions between the various political factions and Jews, gays, immigrants and communists are all played out against a backdrop of Hitler's rise to power, and the pursuit of a shadowy killer.
