The Widow Killer

click here for more details, find new or used items	Pavel Kohout Our price £9.89 (£14.99) New from £4.82 Used from £0.89 Pages: 400 (Paperback) ISBN: 0312252897 Pub: Picador USA Pub date: 2000-01-01 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 119472

Reader Reviews:

Electrifying- -completely satisfying on every level. (6/6 people found this helpful)

This stimulating and thought-provoking murder mystery provides a unique insight into the waning days of the Nazi occupation of Prague. A vicious killer is stalking, torturing, and butchering women, and both the Gestapo and the local Prague police are searching for the killer. Both groups are also concerned with saving themselves, their country's interests, and as many supporters as they can in the confusing days at the end of the war.

The psychological astuteness with which Kohout depicts both the killer and his searchers gives a credibility to this frenetic period rarely seen in fiction. Though it is, of course, easy to identify with the underdog Prague police, Kohout goes beyond mere surface characterization here to create in Morava a fully rounded character, filled with self-doubt but dreaming of a future. And with remarkable even-handedness, he also creates in Buback a Gestapo agent who is more than a caricature or an unthinking Nazi automaton.

As the killer's actions become increasingly lurid in the frenzy of the final days, the reader recognizes numerous parallels with the Nazis' scorched earth policy and with the behavior of Czech partisans bent on wreaking vengeance. This insightful, carefully wrought, and fast-paced action novel with its unique glimpses of a turbulent time and place will keep you reading well into the night! Mary Whipple

Exquisitly written historical drama (1/1 people found this helpful)

I picked up the book because I recognised the Charles Bridge on the front cover and was intrigued to read something set in Prague at the end of WWII.

It's not a perfect book, but if you're into the politics at the end of the Nazi era, you'll like this. There's also a good story in there, too -- Czech nationals and German occupiers chasing after a serial killer in the dying days of the war.

The characterisations are a bit uneven, but some of the main characters were interesting. The setting and plot made up for that shortcoming, however, and the twist toward the end (as the cops were on the trail of the killer) payed off nicely in the final pages.

A great story! (0/0 people found this helpful)

A superb story, with a historically accurate background.

a gripping, layered story of politics & history in Prague (0/0 people found this helpful)

When I received this book for Christmas, I thought I was receiving a mystery novel. But that is only the first layer of this intriguing book. Kahout slowly and carefully pulls back layer after layer of the complex political and historical machinations occurring in Prague at the end of World War II. He frames the story with 2 primary characters, one a Czech detective, one a Gestapo agent. Kahout gives them full emotional range and views so many of the events of the last weeks of the war through each of their emotional prisms. This is a rich, deep novel that continually mines fresh perspectives of history, politics, humanity and morality at a turning point in the lives of everyone in Central Europe. The final pages, viewed from today's perspective, are particularly chilling.

Know When to Stop Writing (0/0 people found this helpful)

This book was gripping and intelligent for almost 250 pages. It reminded me very much of Gorky Park, one of my favoritie novels, in the way it blended politics, murder, mayhem and foreign concepts of crime detection. But then the author's late 20th century political agenda intruded, destroying a well crafted novel. After a book filled with numerous bumbling errors by the detective, many of them fatal, the detective decides to join the communist forces reestablishing a Czech state. The last line of the book informs us that this is the detective's worst mistake. Really? In the era of word processors, the biggest challenge is often knowing when to stop writing.

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