Nights In Berlin

February 15, 2016
Set in 1927, Law’s diverting fourth Francis Bacon mystery (after 2014’s Moon over Tangier) takes the future painter and the black sheep of his family because of his sexual preferences from London, where his father believes the 16-year-old is well on the road to ruin, to Berlin. His uncle Lastings, who’s to accompany him to the German capital, promises to shape Francis up so that he can return home as “a model boy in the soldierly mode.” But on arrival, Francis finds that his uncle is fully at home in a city that Lastings calls “the welcome circus of depravity.” Francis wonders how his relative can afford to stay at the swank Adlon Hotel, and his unease deepens when Lastings claims that he’s the Berlin agent for an anti-Bolshevik organization, the Society for a Christian Europe. Lastings soon gets Francis implicated in a murder, making his nephew a fugitive. Some light humor leavens the suspenseful plot.