In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

This true-life novel about William Dodd, the US ambassador to Germany from 1933-1937, and his family is my least preferred of Larson's books. (Well of the ones I have read anyway). It focuses wholly on Dodd, a representative of morals but inadequate ability, and his daughter Martha, whose poor decision making, leads her to have concurrent liaisons with a French diplomat, an agent posing as a Soviet diplomat, and the head of the German Gestapo. The account of the Night of the Long Knives is intense, but the rest of the book doesn’t even come close to his other works.

2 Stars