by Max Hertzberg
(Wolf Press, ISBN 978-0-9933247-0-3)
East Berlin, early 1990s: a murder, a political intrigue and a diplomatic dance. So far, so predictable for a spy story based in the dark and gritty post-Communist era just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Max Hertzberg’s first novel has an interesting premise: the German Democratic Republic has decided not to join West Germany, but to go it alone – to form a ‘Grassroots Democratic Republic’ from which a true socialist utopia will emerge.
