Not much to add to cawilliams, but that was 14 years back and worthy of a comment.
I agree the first couple of chapters were weak, but then something clicks and develops into quite the mystery. They wore out the roads traveling back and forth and of course dealing with the personalities, but definitely worth the time. A surprising quick read for almost 400 pages.
I have not heard anything more plausible to explain the disappearance of this room, seems reasonable to me. ( )

A missed opportunity. Despite the first-rate subject matter, the exposition is leaden and the story loses the reader. See Helms "A Life in Secrets" for an example of how this should be done. ( )

In 1701, Frederick I, King in Prussia, commissions the building of the Amber Room but he dies before it is completed. His son, Frederick William I, decides that rather than complete it himself (a drain on the royal treasury) he will give it as a gift to Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia. Peter gets the Room back to Russia but he too dies before it can be completed and installed. It is his daughter, the Tsarina Elizabeth, who completes the project. The room is moved several times but eventually it is installed in the Catherine Palace and there it remains until the Nazis invade in 1941. They dismantle the Room and move it back to Konigsberg in crates and that is the last time it is seen. In 2001, two investigative journalists start tracking down what happened to the Amber Room. The story crosses three "worlds" of Eastern Europe: Imperial Russia of the Tsars, the Soviet Union and her allies, and modern day Russia.

I love history and this book is about history. It is amazing to see the similarities and differences between these three periods of Russia. It is also amazing to see what lengths people will go to when driven by fear. They write with a clean voice that grabs your attention and keeps you interested in the story. The story is laid out as it unfolded for the them; you follow all the same rabbit trails they did. In the process, you get a glimpse into the world of the post-WWII Soviet Union and her ally, the German Democratic Republic. You also get a glimpse of the workings of modern-day Russia where "everything is forbidden but all things are possible." Money greases everything in the new Russia - a lot like the US in that sense.

The one gripe I had with this this book is the first chapter or so comes across as whining, a kind of "it's so hard to get any information, life is so difficult" thing. I think the bulk of the book conveys the difficulty of trying to get information from the Soviet Union, the GDR, and the new Russia and post-reconstruction Germany without the whining. ( )