A 3.75 on the nat-o-meter. Kept me turning the pages and I enjoyed the way the authors set the interior scenes, the townscapes and cityscapes.

There is a great review by J. Sydney Jones on his Scene of the Crime blog.

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If you have a strong stomach, a tendency to get lost in extremely immersive novels and you don't mind a protagonist sleuth who never solves anything, then this book is for you. A Visible Darkness stands apart from other detective fiction in that it exemplifies how a novel can have an idiot for a main character and a plot anyone can see coming (and most reviewers do) while at the same time keeping you on the edge of your reading chair because you do not want the completely realistic world to end. As the third book in the series around Magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis, who is a blend between prosecutor, police detective and civil servant, this novel does not bring anything new. Perhaps that is exactly what we want and what the authors had in mind.

In the rural village of Lotingen in Prussia magistrate Stiffeniis has yet again been summoned by the French invaders to solve the gruesome killing of one of the women who collects raw amber from the Baltic sea. Stiffeniis complies after the French promise to clean up the filth that has been left by the French army as they marched through the magistrate's home town. Hanno Stiffeniis soon realizes the French want this mystery cleared up as soon as possible because the crime interferes with their amber mining operation on the Baltic coast. The magistrate rumbles through the story from one colorful character to another who each in term tell him exactly where to go next for valuable information. Part of the charm of the novel is the vivid description of the lifelike people the magistrate encounters. We learn about the practice of medicine during the Napoleonic era, we come across plenty of descriptions of living conditions but mostly we find out what biological mysteries kept the people busy. Europe around 1810 was in social, theological and mostly scientific turmoil. After the many new discoveries of the previous hundred years had been absorbed and made available at the major universities, scholars began to slowly separate alchemy from biology. Around the time this novel takes place that separation was still in full swing and the core of the book revolves around those who can not tell the difference between the two.

It is difficult to rate a novel such as this on only one scale. The writing quality and historical detail is far better than anything out there, but the protagonist has to be one of the dumbest sleuths ever encountered in literary history. Most readers will have found out what's really going on in the book more than a hundred pages before the main character does and from that point on reading the text becomes extremely tedious. Unlike the other novels in the series, this one doesn't satisfactorily explain the motives of the killer and we're left wondering about an abundance of details that apparently have no point. With all the shortcomings the novel still works but it does so in a surprising fashion. We're used to stories that have cliffhangers.

Traditionally cliffhangers are stories where a clue is withheld right at the end and we need to get the next installment or read the next chapter to find out what happens next. In a lot of modern novels the cliffhanger is replaced by the Worldhanger. What I mean by that is that we're put in a situation in a story where we want the fictional world to continue and for that to happen we need to get the next installment or read the next chapter. The books by Michael Gregorio are an excellent examples of Worldhangers but there are others. Thinking in terms of a Worldhanger or a story designed to keep you in an imaginary world are becoming more and more prevalent. It also explains the mysterious attraction of such books as The Historian or Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell, in which nothing really happens and nothing is actually resolved. This phenomenon of a Worldhanger explains why readers finish a book such as Visible Darkness even though a tremendous amount of content is truly disgusting and difficult to get through even with a strong stomach. ( )

Michael Gregorio’s third mystery with Procurator Hanno Stiffeniis once again brings the magistrate more than his share of troubles. Living as a Prussian in territory occupied by French troops after the disastrous Battle of Jena, the reader learns, has its share of humiliations both large and small. And yet when a string of murders occur amongst the amber gathering girls working on the shores of the Baltic Sea, the French turn to Stiffeniis and his proven track record to solve the crime. After all, there's a need to keep the trade in priceless amber flowing and thus keep the French war machine running in Spain.


Stiffeniis is certainly caught between a rock and a hard place. Being known to cooperate with an invading force and help assure their continued stripping away of his country’s wealth and resources is a risky endeavor. But on the other hand, Prussian women are being murdered, and someone needs to stop the killer. And perhaps with success the French might be obliged and owe a few favors to his town of Lotingen? So, bidding his wife Helena farewell, he heads to Nordkopp to try and stop a monster.


That moral dilemma seems to characterize the shades of grey that pervade the book: few characters and situations are fully what they seem on the surface. Stiffeniis himself lives in fear of the blacker regions of his own soul, a thing he has admitted to few people—the foremost being his mentor, Immanuel Kant, who encouraged his turn to criminal investigation. Each crime he investigates seems to evoke both a passion for justice and a need to better understand that inner darkness.


The first decade of the nineteenth century is keenly drawn, and modern readers will probably find themselves being thankful for the benefits of modern medicine and hygiene more than once. Gregorio’s use of Prussia, a rare fictional setting, and Prussian culture and identity at a period of upheaval and change in German history, gives the series a real shine. The crimes are gruesomely vivid, providing urgency to the narrative. Amber, as a valued commodity, a work of art, and a Prussian cultural resource and pride, plays its own vital role in the tale.


The details are sharp and the mood is gloomy and heavy, well representative of horrid acts committed in a subjugated nation. “A Visible Darkness” doesn’t make for easy reading, but it’s an intense, compelling book that’s well worth the time. ( )