I gave it a try, but made it only to page 110. I picked the book up as "an Inspector Troy thriller," but Inspector Troy made no appearance in the first quarter of the book, nor is this a thriller; in fact, the part that I read was a grim historical novel set in Vienna during the Nazi takeover and the beginning of the Jewish genocide. I'm aware of many of the ways that the Nazis stole the dignity from their victims before dispatching them, and I didn't enjoy reading about it again. And after reading it, I found the idea of this book somehow finally turning into "an Inspector Troy thriller," with the escapist lack of seriousness that the label implies, tasteless.

I kept going for 110 pages partly because the book *is* better written than your average murder mystery, and I wanted to know why the reviewer at the Chicago Tribune found Lawton as good as Le Carré. But ultimately, even the writing fell through for me as historical characters were introduced. The portrayal of Churchill was believable enough, but I found Lawton's Freud too sweet-tempered and gregarious for a man suffering from a painful, terminal cancer of the jaw, and Lawton's H.G. Wells was a mere caricature apparently designed to make socialists seem silly.

I admire Lawton's ambition, but it seems misplaced. ( )

Great personal rather than portentous depiction of the early days of World War II--when you're in the middle of things, how do you know if it's historic, if it'll get better or worse? The book jacket overstates the thriller and spying parts of the story; fans of Foyle's War on TV would enjoy the pace and tone. ( )

More a history than a mystery., this novel is set earlier with, Troy as a Sergeant of the Murder Squad but seconded to Special Branch. There, he discovers that thuggery and racial profiling were not just practiced in Germany. Timely flashbacks and much flitting among character perspectives keep the story lively and interesting. Soupcons of real people liven the broth nicely ( )

Although Lawton's books are shelved in the mystery section and this one is subtitled "An Inspector Troy Thriller," and one of the jacket blurbs calls him an espionage writer, I don't think he really belongs in any of those categories. His novels (of which I've read two now)could readily fit into the Guardian's "State of the Nation" category; the sections dealing with Frederick Troy are in the genre of Bildungsroman just as much as they are police procedurals. In both [b:Riptide|303098|Riptide|Douglas Preston|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173555399s/303098.jpg|131682] and [b:Second Violin|579753|One of Us Is Wrong (Felony & Mayhem Mysteries)|Samuel Holt|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175974986s/579753.jpg|566660], there is quite a lot of the book before Troy even appears; his brother and father are also major characters, especially in Second Violin. There is espionage (in Riptide in particular) but it doesn't seem to be the focus of the series. These two books, the first and second in chronological order although not published as such, remind me of the television series Foyle's War in the way that they evoke the life of Britain during the Second World War. Troy, who is actually just a Sergeant in this book, is the son of a Russian emigre who has made a fortune as a newspaper publisher and writes his own editorials. His elder brother is a journalist. Famous people of the time appear occasionally but not excessively. Second Violin seems to me to fall outside the categories of thriller/mystery/spy story because it has more than one theme or focus, but one of the important ones is identity -- who is British? who is not? Don't expect a formula story, but this is well worth reading and I'll be seeking out the remainder of the series, which I believe carries on into at least the 1960s.
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Second Violin attempts, I think, to be something of an epic; somewhat audaciously depicting many aspects of war time life both in continental Europe and in Britain and delving into all classes and communities. From the Austrian/German Anschluss in 1938 the book jumps through a series of seminal historical events including Kristallnacht, England’s declaration of War, the internment of various classes of ‘alien’, the London Blitz and so on. Somehow inveigling their way into all of these happenings are the Troy family which includes Russian émigré Sir Alex Troy, now a retired newspaper baron, and his two sons Rod, a journalist, and Freddie a police constable. One or other of them is centrally involved in all of these events (and then some) as the book hurtles, at pace, along. At about the three quarter mark there is a cursory police investigation into some curious deaths but potential readers should believe the author when he says the series that this book is part of is not crime fiction.

Surprisingly (perhaps) it wasn’t the lack of a mystery element to the novel that bothered me but rather its epic scope. I think I’d rather have seen a few events or incidents teased out with more depth than have an entire wartime experience condensed into 15 hours of listening. On multiple occasions just as I was becoming interested in some aspect of the story – a Jewish tailor’s flight from Vienna for example or the experiences of the fascinating mixture of characters in an internment camp on the Isle of Mann – I’d be whisked away to some other drama. Individually all of these events could probably power their own novel so I felt a bit cheated to have them all crammed into the one book. I was reminded a little of being back in school when history text books just skimmed the surface and threw up a lot of names and dates. What I wanted then and want still is to get behind all the facts and figures and with Second Violin I found myself tantalisingly close to doing that but never quite getting there.

This doesn’t stop the book from being both entertaining and insightful though. The process of identifying which ‘aliens’ would be locked up for the war’s duration, and how that process worked, was, for example, depicted as the farce we now know it to have been. The parallels with more recent political skirmishes are well-drawn although, I’m certain, would be entirely unseen by any powers-that-be who happened upon the book.

I did not find any of the Troy family particularly engaging as characters, feeling they’re all a little too unrealistic to be the kind of people I could truly grow to love. I admit this is unfair on my part as I am quite smitten by Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody who is at least equally as unrealistic and potentially allegorical as the Troy brothers and I can’t really put my finger on why I didn’t take to the Troys more but there’s not a lot I can do about it. I adored some of the other characters in the novel though, including the aforementioned Austrian tailor and his part-Polish, mostly Cockney boss.

Unfortunately and unusually there was an aspect of the narration of the audio book that was a bit off-putting too. There didn’t seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to the voices, in particular the accents, that the narrator chose to use. So Sigmund Freud (one of many real life characters to make a cameo appearance in the novel) has a vaguely Viennese accent while the German foot-soldier who helps the tailor escape has a Cockney accent. Most peculiar.

Overall then I liked this book but didn’t love it. Apart from being a bit too shallow for my personal preference I think the epic scope of the story resulted in a lack of narrative focus. You couldn’t possibly suggest that the investigation of the deaths that Troy carries out is the book’s focus as this doesn’t occupy more than a small fraction of the story and doesn’t start until close to the end. So to me Second Violin read more like a series of vignettes of ‘highlights’ of the wartime experience than a closely woven narrative and my preference will always be for the latter. ( )