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Fatherland is a curious mix of two genres, a police-procedural thriller and speculative historical fiction. Set in the mid-nineteen sixties, the book posits what if Hitler won? Robert Harris does a great job of creating the claustrophobic and backstabbing world of Berlin under the Nazi regime. Fatherland's main character is a homicide detective who is a workhorse of a man, Xavier March is divorced from his wife and estranged from his young son, his only interest is solving cases.

He gets a doozy of a murder mystery, an old party hack is drowned outside of his expensive villa. The Gestapo thinks it's accidental, but March sees signs of bruising on the corpse and knows a cover up when he sees one. The only negative I have from the story is the rather one dimensional characters. I would have liked to have the author explain how a decent man and millions of German citizens could be so naive and so blase at the same time. Is self-interest and narcissism completely blinding?