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    The Sleepwalkers
    The Sleepwalkers
    The Sleepwalkers
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Sleepwalkers

    Written by Paul Grossman

    Narrated by Christian Contreras

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    During the final weeks of the Weimar Republic, a young woman washes up in the Havel River in picture-perfect Old Spandau. Bodies in rivers are hardly news in the chaos of 1932 Berlin, maddened by years of war, defeat, revolution, inflation, depravity, and now the Great Depression. But this one is different. Her dark hair is too short. Her wisdom teeth have been removed, something few German girls could afford. And her legs, dotted with suture marks, are bizarrely deformed, as if someone had taken giant pliers and turned them around inside her skin. Willi Kraus is a decorated soldier and Germany's most celebrated Jewish detective, thanks to his recent success at nabbing a monstrous child killer. Sent to investigate the floater, his search leads him into a German underworld he hardly recognizes. A princess goes missing, a hypnotist has dark secrets to hide, and a new power is ushering in the tides of change: the Third Reich.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9781615731060
    The Sleepwalkers
    Author

    Paul Grossman

    Paul Grossman is a long time teacher of writing and literature at Hunter College. He is the author of The Sleepwalkers and Children of Wrath.

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    Reviews for The Sleepwalkers

    3.5/5

    235 ratings97 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Received a copy through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Sadly, I just couldn't get into it; I found the characters too pat and broadly sketched, and gave up part-way through. Left me wishing for much more subtlety, an underappreciated virtue for mysteries and books touching on Third Reich Germany.
    • 5/5
      Willi Kraus is a Berlin detective in the last days of the Wemar Republic. He is Jewish, a World War I veteran, and a holder of the Iron Cross. Women have been disappearing in Berlin and in their last sightings they have been reported as looking as though they were sleep walking. A body of a young woman is found in the Havel River. Her legs have been reversed and transplanted as if she were a mermaid. Kraus uncovers a house of horrors run by the Institute for Racial Hygiene. Among the members of this organization are Josef Mengele. Terrible experiemts are being carried out in a place called Sachsenhausen. Men and women are being radiated and castrated, twins are being subjected to inhuman experimentation.Kraus uncovers all this as Hitler comes to power and the Berlin Police force is being Nazified. He recovers proof of these crimes and turns them over to the last Wiemar head of government. Surely, if these crimes can be made public the Nazis will be discredited and Hitler may not come to power. This evidence of these atrocities is being stored in the Reichstag. As Kraus breaks into the Reichstag to recover the evidence it has been set on fire to help sweep Hitler into power. It is a very powerful book and held my attention from the very beginning.
    • 3/5
      I was interested in reading this book, the Sleepwalkers, by Paul Grossman, primarily for the historical setting of pre WWII Germany. The book was well-written. The characters were engaging and well-realized. The pace of the plot was consistent. I found, however, that the introduction of historical figures ad nauseum was too contrived and lessened my enjoyment of the story. It was a bit too "deus ex machina" for my tastes. I had hoped for another author in the mold of Philip Kerr, whose novels set in pre-war Germany have more of a sense of authenticity that this one did. That said, I will probably give subsequent books by him a try.
    • 4/5
      I became engrossed in The Sleepwalkers the moment I began reading. The protagonist, Willi Kraus, slowly awakens to the horrors to come as Nazis come to power in Berlin. I look forward to Paul Grossman's next novel, Children of Wrath.
    • 4/5
      A good mystery. Captured my attention. Detailed history. Although the mystery was solved and secrets were revealed, the ending was sad, for good reason of course, because of the timing of the war.
    • 4/5
      A very good fictional account of life in pre-Nazi Germany, told from the POV of a Jewish homicide detective. The book gets across the point that the average people were "sleepwalking" their way towards a Hitler-ruled country and World War II.As much as I like the main character, Willi Kraus, the setting is the star of this story. The author built the book around the life in pre-war Berlin. In some ways, Berlin itself is the main character of the book.I hope to see more along this line by Paul Grossman.
    • 4/5
      Paul Grossman's The Sleepwalkers is a strong debut novel, a mystery with a tinge of horror. The book is well-written and moves swiftly, with a cast of interesting characters, including 1930's Berlin. I'll definitely seek out other works by this author.
    • 5/5
      The era, characters, suspense, plot and historical research. I will read another of his novels.
    • 3/5
      I received this novel through Early Reviewers. It was a good story. Seemed to be accurately researched. The protagonist was a very interesting character in that as a Jewish detective who has recently solved a high profile case is thrown into a new one just as Hitler is about to come to power. While the world he knew crumbles around him, he is determined to solve this case even if it means ranking some Nazi feathers. He discovers that the mutilated body of a young woman found in the Havel River is only the beginning of a sadistic and brutal murderer or murderers. I rated this 3 stars because it was a good solid read. I didn't love it, but it did keep my interest.
    • 4/5
      This book was a pleasure to read. You can really tell a difference between a book that is well written vs. other books. Even though I was not sure I wanted to read about the rise of the Nazi party, I found myself enthralled by the story of Willi Kraus, a Jewish detective trying to solve a murder amidst the growing anti-Jewish sentiment. The central mystery was intriguing, and we got to meet an eccentric cast of characters including a hypnotist, street children, prostitutes and aristocrats. All of the characters were well written and drew me into their stories.

      As I read, I felt an increasing sense of sorrow and anxiety. Willi and his Jewish friends grow more worried about the Nazi agenda, while at the same time not believing that it could really be carried out. As a reader, I know how the story will turn out for millions of Jewish people, but Willi does not, and I wanted to scream at him to leave Germany before it is too late. The ending was very stressful for me to read, and I could not put it down until I was finished.

      I really enjoyed reading this book, and I would recommend it to my friends.

      I received this book for free through the goodreads first reads program.
    • 3/5
      This is a great crime drama set in pre-WWII Germany that discusses some of the real things that were done.

      Good read!
    • 3/5
      In interesting premise - a Jewish detective on the Murder Squad in Berlin towards the end of 1932 just before the Nazi takeover.


      The author seems to cover well the atmosphere of Berlin in 1932, but I found the characterisations and dialogue a bit thin.

      However, the story rolls on a quick pace and kept me entertained. Not a "great" read, but I did like it and if you're interested in pre-WW2 Berlin and enjoy the David Downing "Station" series then this would be worth a look.
    • 3/5
      Wasn't quite sure what to think about this book. To be honest, I only read half the book. I just couldn't finish it. It just wasn't what I expected.
    • 2/5
      This is the first in a new series featuring featuring a German Jew police detective at the time of the Nazi takeover of Germany. It was a good enough story but after half a lifetime reading mysteries I found this rather predictable. I was able to foresee many events before they were revealed and found many of the characters cliched. The friend reporter, the hooker with a heart of gold and a wife lost to violence. I did like the protagonist but not enough to continue the series. Other than the historical setting I found it generic.
    • 2/5
      I did not dislike the book overall, but it had nothing new to add to genre. Written well, the characters were a bit too much boilerplate, and the historical "truths" rather circumspect. I would of borrow it from the library, but not a purchase for my permanent library. I would go with a book by Kerr versus this book, and I am not sure I would seek out other books written by this author.
    • 1/5
      An awful attempt to be the next Philip Kerr. There are many common traits between The Sleepwalkers and the Bernie Gunther's series: the setting (Berlin in the final year of Weimar Republic) and the protagonists background: both are WW I heroes and famous police investigators. While Kerr is adept at transmit Bernie's thoughts and feelings, Grossmann instead can't do that, even if hammers in the dangerous atmosphere of that time. *Spoiler Alert*There is another, big and worse difference between Grossmann and Kerr: the wrongness of the historical setting in The Sleepwalkers. In a historical novel, the name calling isn't sufficient to depict an era, the details and above all the historical facts are to be precise. In The Sleepwalkers there are a lot of famous peoples, but there is also a big, factual error. The plot revolves around the human experiments in Oranienburg that never happened in 1932, when there was still a (sort of) democratic state and the SS were in the beginning of their development. Only in 1933 Oranienburg will become one of the first (wild) concentration camp ruled by SA and the human experiments will start only after 1939.
    • 3/5
      The Sleepwalkers. Paul Grossman. 2010. For some reason, maybe because I read Uris’ Armageddon when it came out, I have always been fascinated with the city of Berlin.This mystery is set there when Hitler is in the process of taking over. The main character is a Chief Inspector in the detective division of the police department. He is also the only Jew in the department who became famous when he solved an infamous serial murder. The body of a young woman is found and the autopsy reveals that the bones of her legs had been transplanted. Willi eventually discovers that doctors close to Hitler are experimenting on human subjects. The rise of Hitler and his pals and the decadence of Berlin are fascinating reading. The author provides a note on historical accuracy at the end of the book
    • 5/5
      Detective Willi Kraus is the type of man anyone would want on his or her team. He is notorious for bringing to justice a serial killer. However, at the rise of the Third Reich he has two things against him. First is the fact he is a Jew. The second problem for him is his connection to those currently in power as Hitler is beginning to gain his. Both of these make him the enemy of the Nazis.When he is called to investigate the floating body of a once beautiful woman he realizes he has a monster to find. This killer has obviously done some experimenting on this young girls lower legs, and she is just the first. His hunt takes him into some scary places. Scary because he is dealing with the rise of the Nazis and he is a Jew.This is an on the edge of your seat read. I knew nothing about the Weimer era until a couple of months back. That was when I read my first book set in that time period. Grossman has opened our eyes as to how Hitler slowly began his slide into power. It was not a situation where he showed up with guns one day and blew away the Jews to get his point across. He was sneaky. The title of this book tells it all. Sleepwalkers, is a metaphor for the people of that time. They walked right into the Nazi trap as if they were sleepwalking. Of course, we know it was too late when they realized it. That was the other thing that made the books so wonderful. Since I entered this book with prior knowledge of that time, I was constantly holding my breath for the main character. Unfortunately, I could see parallels between what went down during the rise of the Nazis and the turn our government is taking. I am not saying we are headed the way of Hitler. What I am saying is I see Americans turning a blind eye to everything that happens in our country saying it is not their fight, let someone else handle it. That is exactly how Hitler came into power.Even though I know the outcome of that Hitler’s rise to power and the effect it had on Jews and others, I kept hoping that things would be different for Willi Kraus. It is inherent that we want the good guys to win and the bad guys to fail. History doesn’t follow those wants.This book is necessary read for the historical accuracy, and the edge of your seat mystery. I will definitely find myself reading more of this author’s work.
    • 3/5
      I really did enjoy this book - I thought it was fast-paced, exciting, and in the historical context, I was anxious that the characters should be safe. I thought that the use of German phrases was annoying - there wasn't really any apparent rhyme or reason to what phrases were put down in German and about half the time the English translation/paraphrase of the German was included, half the time it wasn't - choose one way or the other, or better yet, just don't include it! But, that aside, the story was exciting, the storytelling good, and the characters sympathetic.
    • 3/5
      I found the storytelling shallow and did not enjoy.
    • 2/5
      The Sleepwalkers is a crime/suspense novel set in Berlin in the early 1930's when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were preparing to take over Germany. Berlin detective Willi Kraus is assigned to investigate the death of a drowned young woman who was pulled out of a river with bizarrely surgically altered legs. As Kraus pursues the investigation he starts to uncover a vast and deep conspiracy of evil.Willi Kraus is a sympathetic character and that is what kept me going. I didn't find the book very suspenseful. Kraus is supposed to feel hemmed in by the conspiracy but there was nothing that indicated that except the character saying it. Suspenseful scenes ended abruptly or had other unsatisfying ends. It was a frustrating book to read in some senses.I give it two stars out of five. I liked the characters, I loved the back story about Berlin in those times, but not the story too much.I feel like a traitor. St. Martin's Griffin the publisher gave me this copy to review. Sorry guys! I appreciate it though.
    • 4/5
      This book, set in late 1932 Weimar Germany, is one scary book. One reason I like dystopias so much is that the horrible people in them are just pretend. But the Nazis who came to power in early 1933 were not pretend, and they committed atrocious crimes. And this close-up look at Berlin just as the brownshirts were taking it over is frightening both for what is described and for what you know will be coming later.Inspektor-Detektiv Willi Kraus, 35, is a respected Berlin homicide cop who received the Iron Cross for his heroism in World War I, and additionally is a local hero for solving a child-killer crime not long ago. His wife Vicki died two years earlier in a freak accident, and her sister now raises his two young sons, Stefan and Erich.Now Kraus has two new cases. Washed up in the river on the west side of Berlin near Spandau, the body of a woman has been found with mutilated legs – her fibulae have been surgically removed and replanted in the opposite direction. Kraus also is charged with finding a missing Bulgarian princess. While missing persons are not within his ordinary purview, this situation could cause a diplomatic crisis. Both cases turn out to be connected, however. In fact, a number of women have gone missing over the past nine months, all of whom were thought to be under a hypnotic trance when they abruptly left their homes and took the train out to Spandau, from which they never returned.What Kraus discovers is a horrific preview of barbarity to come. And yet he, like so many other Jews at that time, still thinks that reason will prevail, and resists the idea of leaving Germany. At one point he muses:"Sylvie was the third person this week who’d told him to get out of Germany. It was getting annoying. His family had been here what, since the time of Charlemagne? Why would anyone think he’d just pack up and run? And yet…he couldn’t keep himself from wondering if he ever really did have to leave…where would he go?”But increasingly, his ability to do his job is stymied by anti-Semitism. As more and more non-Jews are hypnotized by facism, more and more Jews sleepwalk to their deaths. At the end of the book, you find yourself racing through to see if Kraus will escape in time.Discussion: For me, there were some problems with the book. The intermittent insertion of German phrases is bizarre – the characters presumably all speak German, not English. It just didn’t make sense. The tropes of hypnotism and sleepwalking are clever but at the same time too obviously trying to convey a message about pre-War Germany. And while I accept that the author messed around with the dates of some historical events for plot reasons (which he explains in the afterward), the addition of dialogue from some of the many historical figures of the era just felt like unnecessary “name-dropping.”Evaluation: This is a definite page-turner with an interesting premise – a Jewish cop trying to solve a crime in the early days of the Nazis. There is an eclectic, interesting cast of characters, and by the end, you can’t put it down until you know what will happen.
    • 4/5
      I have recently taken a few courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany while pursuing my Masters, so this book provided an interesting fictional take on the time of Hitler's rise to power. I especially liked the portrait that Grossman painted of Berlin as a hub of such vibrant city life, and "seeing" all of these long gone places.While I do enjoy historical fiction, I am not sure I would place this on any of my tops lists, but not because of the writing or the overall sense of intrigue - but in the path this crime solving story took.
    • 2/5
      The author has attempted to plough the same ground as authors like Jonathan Rabb, Alan Furst, and the inimitable Philip Kerr in his Bernie Gunther novels. Unfortunately, Grossman hasn't turned over anything new. His detective hero -- hero in the war and the most highly regarded detective in the post-war Weimar period -- seems unable to detect, from the events that surround him daily, just what the Nazis' agenda is. Even though, as a Jew himself, he encounters various slurs that are directed to Jews in general by the Brownshirts and other thugs roaming the streets of Berlin, he, much like the rest of the Berliners he portrays, can't seem to accept what is plainly happening. I don't wish to give anything away, but while the case he is tasked with solving seems to involve sleepwalkers, it is the German population that appears to be "sleepwalking" through current events. Perhaps that is what the author really intended to convey; what a shame he managed to convey it in ways both trite and wooden.
    • 4/5
      Placing a Jewish detective in Berlin in the early thirties is really just borrowing a lot of trouble. The reader can't help but agree with the numerous characters who warn Willi Kraus to get out before it's too late. Grossman picked his specific days and months well, however, and doesn't try to stick too much to historical fact. The end result is that, while the reader agrees with the warnings to get out, we can also understand why Willi doesn't. The mystery itself is a little overblown, but in the setting, when so many events turned on so few, that's understandable.
    • 4/5
      Paul Grossman has written a very intriguing book based in the early days of Hitlers rise to power. It was a book that made you want to keep reading and see where Inspektor Willi Kraus was going to end up next. Intertwining historical Nazi figures into the background of 1930's Berlin, some liberties were taken with the timelines, but that didn't really distract from a good decetive novel. My only negative comment is around the epilogue, which just seemed a bit of a throw away, and didn't really wrap the story up any better than the end of the final chapter.A good read, with a plausible story based on the sort of medical experimentation that could have been carried out by the nazis at that time.
    • 3/5
      Maybe I shouldn't have read this book immediately after finishing one of Robert Wilson's excellent World War II spy novels, but I found it a bit lighter weight than Wilson. I will say that it was a quick read, and once I got started, finished it in just a couple of days. I felt there was a major attempt to do name-dropping of all the major Nazi figures of the war to add interest and scope, but I believe it could have been done as well with just a couple of them and a ficticious Nazi as principal. History was twisted considerably iin this book, so why not the characters as well?In any event, it was a readable book, and I will lend it to a couple of friends with similar interests. I'd consider it better than average.
    • 5/5
      Where I got the book: LibraryThing Early Reviewers programInspektor-Detektiv Willi Kraus's new case involves a corpse whose leg bones are the wrong way round. And a sleepwalking princess. Stringing together the clues drags him into contact with history; in Berlin in 1933, Hitler's National Socialists are gaining more power, more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. And they seem to be implicated in the mysterious disappearances.Kraus starts out thinking that he's looking for an ordinary serial killer, but soon realizes there's a lot more involved. His contacts within the traditional power structure, and his knowledge of the Berlin underground, are of great use to him; but he has one huge disadvantage. He's a Jew, and his friends and family are saying just one thing to him: get out of Berlin now.It's such a pleasure to be able to give a five-star review to a debut author. I loved the way Grossman combines the elements of a murder mystery with the history of 1930s Berlin, blending fact and fiction together with great skill. His characters are well-drawn and memorable, and the novel is loaded with descriptive elements that pulled me right into its setting. The writing jarred at a few points, but these were minor quibbles compared to the novel's overall high quality.Recommended for thriller fans who like their reading to have a certain literary quality and a fascinating setting.
    • 2/5
      While the setting of the story in pre-war Germany was interesting the mystery itself was no mystery. a somewhat muddled, trite, not particularly well-written story.
    • 3/5
      Willi Krauss is a Jewish detective and celebrity policeman in light of his solving the Child Eater case. 1932 Germany is not a friendly environment to Jews and though Krauss is a great detective and well-liked he starts having the same issues that other Jews throughout the country are having. I think if the story had stuck to the main plot it would have flowed better but the addition of the missing princess was a bit much. Considering where the story started, the ending was pretty much a given.I'm not overly impressed when authors take liberties with historical events, dates and people. It's historical fiction for a reason. Stick to the timeline, please. Otherwise, the writing is pretty good. I might try out the next book Grossman writes.