From My Point of View - Audiobook Review

I just finished listening to a book by Jeffery Deaver, Garden of Beasts. It's a great story with a lot of adventure. Deaver's tale, set in Berlin around the 1936 Olympics, takes a hitman from New York to Berlin on a secret mission for the U.S. government. Of course, as in any good thriller, few things go according to plan. The story takes you all over Berlin and its environs, which I loved. The only thing that turned me off was the language, I'm not talking about swear language, I'm talking about the way Deaver used, or didn't use, some of the German. It annoyed me that Deaver didn't seem to trust that his reader would know terms such as "Mein Führer" and "Alexanderplatz" so he had to translate them all to "my leader" and "Alexander Plaza", but then he had no problem using "ach" to the point of insanity. Some German terms, I suppose the ones he felt he could explain effectively in the text, were left in their German forms, which made me feel even more that he did not trust me as a reader to know some simple terms that can be heard almost daily in our popular media. Maybe I'm picky, but this really bothered me through the whole book. The audiobook reader also never found out how to pronounce words like "Spandau" which can really hurt one's ears. Overall it's a good story if these things won't bother you, or if you can get past them. If you like thrillers, spy stories, and international espionage set in Nazi Germany then it's probably worth it, otherwise there are better books. I'd recommend Brandenburg Gate by Henry Porter, which I read a little over a year ago. It's a different era, Cold War East Germany, but it's a much better book.

Elizabeth