Title: Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (Prisoner of Night and Fog #2)
Author: Anne Blankman
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Release date: April 21st 2015
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC
Rating: 4/5
Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository
You can read my review of Prisoner of Night and Fog - here
The girl known as Gretchen Whitestone has a secret: She used to be part of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle. More than a year after she made an enemy of her old family friend and fled Munich, she lives with a kindly English family, posing as an ordinary German immigrant, and is preparing to graduate from high school. Her love, Daniel Cohen, is a reporter in town. For the first time in her life, Gretchen is content.
But then, Daniel gets a telegram that sends him back to Germany, and Gretchen’s world turns upside-down. And when she receives word that Daniel is wanted for murder, she has to face the danger she thought she’d escaped-and return to her homeland.
Gretchen must do everything she can to avoid capture and recognition, even though saving Daniel will mean consorting with her former friends, the Nazi elite. And as they work to clear Daniel’s name, Gretchen and Daniel discover a deadly conspiracy stretching from the slums of Berlin to the Reichstag itself. Can they dig up the explosive truth and get out in time-or will Hitler discover them first?
The good or bad about a fiction novel that takes place in a historical period that is well known is that from the beginning you know how it will end or what will happen with some famous historical person. Well this is what happened to me when I was reading Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke, because the main character Gretchen grew within the circle of friends of Adolf Hitler, in fact for her he was "Uncle Dolf," so she loved him and had much respect about his beliefs or doctrines about everything bad in Germany, whether the Jews, or the communists etc. so when she falls in love (in the first book) with Daniel, a Jew, she becomes an undesirable person, a traitor of the blood that´s why her life is in danger, and she should never cross Hitler´s path again.
Gretchen has lived in England for the past seventeen months, along with Daniel; so both are safe, or at least that is until Daniel receives a telegram and he must return to Germany and once there he´s accused of murder, so when Gretchen receives this news she must decide what to do, whether to stay in the safety of England with his new foster family and leave her boyfriend to his fate or to return to Germany and look for him, even though she knows it's very dangerous for her if she´s discovered by Hitler, and this time he has power, because she recently became the Chancellor of Germany.
All the plot unfolds in 1933 Berlin, amid a murder which should clarify the main characters if they want to clear Daniel´s name and the mystery around it. Plus they should do it in a Berlin that is gaining more presence of the SA (the Nazi militia) and through various historical events that will give Hitler more power, something that Gretchen and Daniel want to stop.
Daniel is an idealistic young journalist who believes that if he finds the reason for the murder of which he was accused and the truth about other things related to it, he believes that this knowledge will make a difference in the world and others will see Adolf Hitler for whom he really is, and somehow stop him. There are several times when several characters doubt that Hitler can achieve what he wants to do, which despair me as a reader, because many of the things they doubt he can achieve actually happened.
Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke is a very good second book, I really enjoyed, even more than its predecessor, I really liked the element of murder mystery and suspense; plus it has a very good ending. I highly recommended this duology for historical fiction novels fans.
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