Given the praise his long backlist has received I am surprised that I had not come across Robert Edric before. Although I have only rated this as 3 stars, I will certainly look out for him in the future. This is set in occupied Germany just after WW2 and deals with some of the issues between the occupies and the occupied. I liked his writing style, but found it hard to get involved with the main character. ( )

Like Edric's Peacetime, this novel examines the complex moralities and human relations of a hurting post-war world. Here, the world is 1946 Germany, within the British zone of occupation, where everyone has lost something and everyone is trying to make use of others for their own ends.

Our main character is Alex Foster, a British army interrogator working at "the Institute", processing arrested Germans to see whether they need to be sent to trial.

Unlike some of his colleagues, he does not get his answers by brutalising the prisoners; he also tries to treat his German colleagues with humanity, which gets him into trouble with his boss, Dyer, a man who firmly believes that they are there to do what they have to do and nothing else - the people in the local displaced persons camp, for example, are nothing to do with them.

That said, 'what they have to do' includes staying on the right side of the US, and so Alex ends up re-interrogating a prisoner, Walther, on the basis of a very slender file. Walther is suspected of being involved in an incident where a large group of US POWs were summarily executed. He claims that he was in hospital at the time, but points out, "if I'd been present ... then perhaps I might have participated in what happened. Yes, I don't deny that. Sometimes, and as I'm sure countless others have already made clear to you, Captain Foster, choice in these matters is an unattainable luxury."

This is a masterly, although uncomfortable, tale of complicity and compromise. It's easy to detect analogies with more recent wars, but that's never heavy-handed, and it really is more about the aftermath of war in general - not just the lives lost or shattered, but the utter mistrust between the survivors. ( )