A real page turner for me. Recommend it to those who like WWII and Cold War era spy novels. This one bounces back-and-forth between the 1940s and "today" in Bern, Berlin, and the U.S. Our hero is Nat Turnbull, a History professor who gets mixed up in a high-stakes mystery that just exploded around his mentor. FBI agents, a beautiful history professor who grew up in Communist East Germany, Iranians, resistance fighters and old Nazis round out the cast. Fesperman brings to life the horrors of living in a society where you can trust no one, not even those you love. He doesn't seem to have an axe to grind and doesn't 'moralize.' The result is a book that has left me with a lot to think about it...it is a story that will stay on my mind long after I've read the last page. ( )

Not bad. Got better as it went along and you could get all the characters sorted. ( )

Good Read and I think fairly accurate of a lot of WW2 ( )

Fun to read, complex. Too much "Hollywood" to merit more than 3 stars. ( )

Spies and the second world war. Who doesn't love stories about one or the other?

Spies in the Second World War? Getting better.

Spies today and spies in the Second World War - Now that's a match made in some sort of secret (service) heaven for me.

So 'The Arms Maker of Berlin' had ticked all my right boxes even before I began reading it. And I wasn't disappointed when I finished. Actually, I was disappointed, but only that I had finished it.

What's it about? Hard to pin down without writing a review nearly as long as the book itself, really. Events in Nazi Germany in the closing months of the Second World War, love and betrayal - on many levels - the ripples this causes through the various protagonist's lives through the intervening, post-war partition of Germany, to re-unification and into today's international espionage world.

I found the book really quite moving and genuinely thought-provoking. Yes, there are spies; war-time spies, cold-war spies, the start of the CIA, the Stasi in East Germany and the current international espionage wars of today. It is also about a much more intimate picture of love and emotion and what the emotions caused by love, made people do when under almost unimaginable pressures, like the Second World War. People finding that love and war makes it almost impossible for them to do right, for doing wrong. And about how the effects of World War II, still reach out to today; the emotional 'ripples' from that period, are still being felt.

The book's timeline moves back and forth between the early 1940's and the present day and you will have to pay attention. But it then pays dividends as the story develops and secrets, motives and why people did what they did, gradually become clear.

As I say, I thoroughly enjoyed this one and whilst the cover comment about Dan Fesperman being the new John le Carré, is inappropriately wide of the mark, this is nonetheless one of the best novels I've read in a long time. ( )