In this, the fourth installment of Noel Hyndβs hugely popular Flowers from Berlin series, William Thomas Cochrane returns to Berlin as part of a permanent intelligence posting, replacing an old friend. Cochrane has a special knowledge of Berlin and its people, having worked there undercover during the Hitler era, during World War II, and during the successful 1948-49 airlift. But before Cochrane can safely settle his family in Berlin, he finds himself investigating the suspicious death of the man he succeeded.
It is now the early 1950s. The former capital of Nazi Germany has emerged as the most volatile flashpoint of the Cold War. In Washington, Dwight Eisenhower is the newly elected President of the United States. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin is gravely ill but more aggressive than ever. He rules a Soviet Union that has gone from a backward nation to a world power in four decades. Emboldened now by atomic weapons, the Soviets are hell-bent on forcing the Western Powers β France, Great Britain, and the United States β out of the still-divided former capital. The pro-Moscow Communist government of East Germany controls East Berlin while the United States and its wartime allies control the other half of the city.
And that is only where Cochraneβs problems begin. Soon after his return, a simmering labor conflict explodes between East German workers and their government. The government demands increases in work quotas but without an increase in state-subsidized pay. Shortages of food and clothing accompany the rationing of electricity. A strike among construction workers grows into a mass protest involving fifty thousand East German citizens. Some Berliners in the angry protest demand the removal of the pro-Moscow East German government. East German police and Soviet troops move in and fire on the crowd, killing hundreds.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller