[Deseassaugs]

I'm not sure there's any writer who can't be called an opportunist. We write to be read and to be paid to be read, and if that's opportunism, so be it.

The issue with this novel is that, from my viewpoint as a writer, it's a poorly-written novel. It's dense with undigested research in a story told by an unsympathetic character with apparently no discernible character-arc or nuance in the way he's drawn. I rarely give up on a book, but this one--not from disgust with the contents, but with the results--was a prime candidate.

A writer who has handled his Third Reich research I think brilliantly is Philip Kerr in his Berlin Noir trilogy and the volumes following it. Though these are on the surface detective stories, they're also studies not just of wartime and post-war Germany, but of a certain cast of mind that resulted from being corrupted by a particular ideology.