A review by vkemp
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell

5.0

In 1931 Berlin, hardened crime reporter Hannah Vogel knows how difficult it is to survive. Money is always tight and her family is gone. As she waits for her weekly police reports at the Hall of the Unnamed Dead in the Alexanderplatz police station, she finds a photograph of her brother, lying dead. Hannah resolves to find her brother’s killer. She cannot tell the police this is her brother, Ernst, because he was a cross-dressing chanteuse at the El Dorado, a transvestite club, frequented by members of the Nationalist Socialist party. Hannah writes under the by-line, Peter Weill, for the Berliner Tageblatt; she is in the middle of covering the trial of a rapist and meets one of the victims, Trudi, and her father, Boris. To complicate matters, as Hannah tries to develop a romance with Boris, a five-year old orphan shows up on her doorstep, claiming to be her son, fathered by her brother. At least that is what his birth certificate claims. Who is Anton? Why was Ernst killed? Is Ernst really Anton’s father? Hannah tries to unravel Ernst’s past while staying a step ahead of the Nazis. An evocative look at Berlin between the wars as the Nazis are coming to power.