Blackout

Berlin, December 1939. Under the blackout imposed against Allied air raids, the Nazi capital goes dark every night — and fear spreads with it. When a young former film star, Gerda Korzeny, is found murdered near a railway line, Kriminalinspektor Horst Schenke of the Kripo comes under pressure from his superiors and from rival powers within the Nazi hierarchy to close the case fast, and quietly.

Schenke is an unlikely investigator: a former racing driver whose career ended in a crash that left him with a lasting injury, and one of the few policemen in Berlin who has refused to join the Nazi Party. As he works the case he is pulled between the competing interests of the Gestapo, his own Kripo, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry and Canaris's military intelligence — each with its own reason to steer, or bury, the investigation. Schenke's insistence on following the evidence wherever it leads puts him on a collision course with the regime he nominally serves.

Blackout is the first novel in Simon Scarrow's Berlin Wartime Thriller series featuring Horst Schenke. It was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and a Times bestseller on its 2021 publication.