Rosa

Written by Jonathan Rabb

Published by Crown

400 pages

Review by Robert Reilly

Receives:

Rosa by Jonathan Rabb is an historical mystery noir written in the style of Raymond Chandler. Its main character, Rosa Luxemburg, is a corpse.

It is Berlin, Germany in 1919, just months after the end of World War I. Berlin is falling into a state of economic and political decay, a breeding ground for unrest and fascist political regimes. Rosa Luxemburg is known as the Devil Jewess, a socialist democrat revolutionary, and she is executed in January 1919. Two Berlin detectives are amazed by the appearance of the corpses of middle-aged women with strange markings carved into their backs. Suddenly, Rosa’s corpse appears with similar markings, though the markings are just different enough to spark the detectives’ interest. The detectives begin an inquiry into who murdered Rosa.

Berlin itself is a character in the story. Rabb describes the chaos and the confusion that consumed the city after World War I ended and Germany was made the scapegoat for the war as retribution by its European neighbors for its role in the catastrophe. We can see the planting of the seeds of Anti-Semitism, and it takes only a short leap of logic to see how the Nazi era came about in following years.

Albert Einstein makes an appearance in the detectives’ quest for the truth. I am always chagrined when authors force real-life personalities such as Albert Einstein into their novels. This is a novel about Rosa Luxemburg, not Albert Einstein. Rabb may talk about Rosa all he likes, but it feels false to force other personalities into the story where they do not seem to belong. This may be a way for the author to give more real-life credibility to fiction, but I always find such dabbling distracting from the story. This is a personal peeve of mine and one that I see frequently in historical fiction. If you do not share it, read on.

On the whole I find Rosa to be a well-written novel about Berlin during the post World War I years. Dark and disturbing, as a noir novel about this era should be, Rabb creates a world where trouble is brewing around every corner and nothing is what it seems to be. ______________________________________________________________

Robert Reilly is a writer and reviewer who is currently turning his attention to screenwriting in Hollywood, California.