The Good German, set in Berlin during the summer of 1945, is an equally fast-moving and thought-provoking novel of suspense, and of history, that concerns the end of one war and the beginning of another. Jake Geismar, the former Berlin correspondent for CBS, has been sent back to his old beat to write magazine pieces about the Potsdam Conference, at which America, Britain, and Russia will divide the spoils and determine the future of a recently conquered Germany, a nation of dark secrets and unfathomable atrocities. But as World War II draws to a close, has the Cold War already begun? Moreover, what Jake sees floating in a lake right outside the Potsdam Conference turns out to be (for his purposes, at least) a far more interesting story-and a more personal and more dangerous one, as well. A murder mystery, a love story, and a panoramic depiction of a wholly ravished European metropolis at a unique moment in history, Joseph Kanon's novel is, as Neil Gordon observed in The New York Times Book Review, a "provocative, fully realized [work of] fiction that explores, as only fiction can, the reality of history as it is lived by individual men and women."