I am organizing my books on Netgalley and saw that this book has not been read. It is from a time that a hard disk of mine that I had books on decided to die so I never had the chance to read it and I do not think I will read it after all this time. I am thankful though and I am sorry

1.5 stars rounded up. I’ll admit that political/espionage type thrillers aren’t really my thing. I didn’t realize that’s what I would be getting with this novel…the blurb I saw didn’t clearly convey that. The beginning caught my interest, the rest quickly lost it. Maybe something got lost in translation, but the plot was convoluted and terribly far fetched. And the amateurish inconsistencies…a man is shot in the thigh, left ashen and bleeding out. Next scene, he’s able to walk, trying not to put too much weight on the leg. Next scene, while fleeing, he’s carrying an uninjured woman, telling her it was a mere flesh wound…went straight through. I got motion sickness from how hard my eyes were rolling.

An interesting read that looks at the issues facing those who lived in East Germany- even years after the fact. So many secrets and lies. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This was an interesting mystery/thriller. I would recommend to anyone who likes a good crime/detective story.

Fast paced and interesting thriller about a woman who discovers she's not really who she thought she was.

i'm going to be really honest with my review of THE CLEANER, the story is meant to be about a crime scene cleaner called judith but as the story goes on we find out that she spent 10 years of her childhood in a children's home also shes on the hunt to find out who her real parents are that will lead her in to danger, but to be honest i found it hard to understand the book there was many characters and i found it hard to follow, but in some parts i did start to understand it but then the story went somewhere else and i again found it hard to follow the story...
even though i could see where the author was and wanted to go with this story i just think it was just to hard to understand and as the story went on i did start to like it but not enough to read it again, but saying that others may love the story ..

1985 and East Germany is a place of secrets where the Stasi know all. A young girl is brought into the Yuri Gagarin home and her identity is changed. Years later and the adult, now called Judith, works as a crime scene cleaner, she has suffered addiction and a lack of a sense of belonging. However one day the crime scene she is sent to clean up contains secrets from her own past and suddenly Judith Kepler is wanted by the police and the CIA amongst others because she may have the secret files showing double agents from the 1980s.

There is actually quite an interesting story at the heart of this book, an East German family wanting to escape to the west and holding powerful secrets that thirty years later still need to be suppressed. Unfortunately all of this is wrapped up in a rather run of the mill thriller. Judith is a former heroin addict, now working as a cleaner but somehow she is imbued with superhuman skills - if this were a film and Judith were male then it would be the perfect Jason Statham vehicle!

I'm torn about this book. I love mysteries and I like when they are set in foreign locations. I just struggled with this one. I felt confused a good majority of the time and it just didn't flow for me. This could have to do with the translation, I'm not sure. It was also too long. I felt that it could have been a hundred pages shorter. Overall it was fine but not great.

The Cleaner, a Cold War thriller, by Elisabeth Herrmann was a book I had been eyeing for several months. Originally published in Germany, I was eagerly awaiting the English translation after viewing bits of the synopsis:

Signs of an agonisingly slow death, pools of blood, hands desperately searching for a hold. Judith Kepler has seen it all.

She is a crime scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner.

I am always on the hunt for a twist on the police procedural novel.

This one ended up leaving me with some mixed feelings.

I loved the characterization in this one. Judith, the protagonist, was my favourite. I am always a fan of a female lead and Judith was quick-witted and kind of quirky. She was very easily likeable and I loved how the author tied in her past into the main story line. I also loved her sidekick Kai. Early on in the novel, I found that Judith, as lead, gave a different perspective to the typical police procedural novel, which I was revealed over.

However, this novel was not one hundred percent what I thought it was going to be.
I was under the impression, based on the synopsis that it was about some sort of CSI style, crime scene specialist whose job is to clean up murder scenes. As the novel continued, it became increasingly confusing as the characters referred to Judith as “a cleaning lady”. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the translation from German to English, but I found it confusing to categorize exactly what she did.

I also did find this one very heavy politically; I had a little bit of trouble trying to navigate through all the historical politics in the plot. I wasn’t aware that this would be a historical style thriller, but it focused mainly around the Stasi and the politics in Cold War Germany. The novel sort of switched gears into being a different police procedural perspective to more of a historical lens, which I didn’t mind, just wasn’t expecting.

Overall, I feel as if fans of historical thrillers like Stasi Wolf would enjoy this novel.

Judith Kepler is a cleaner in the former East Germany. She comes in after a person's death and makes the home habitable again. The previous occupant of an apartment she is assigned to clean receives mail from the now-closed orphanage that Judith grew up in. Turns out, it is her own file. This leads Judith, and the reader, on an almost unbelievable journey through the many political groups and spy organizations that existed during the Cold War and exist now. This was the part that I struggled with. I am not familiar with the various groups that came into play during the book so I know I missed some of the nuances. However, that didn't dim my appreciation of the overall plot line of the book and Judith's struggle to uncover her own history and what happened with her parents. I look forward to reading more translations of Ms. Herrmann's books.

It probably says a lot about me as a reader that it was the cover that attracted me to this book. I thought it was a really good read even though I did find it a bit confusing at times. If this had been highlighted as a spy thriller I probably wouldn't have chosen it and that would have been my loss but I do think that to find the right readers it is relevant to mention it. It strikes me that this would transfer easily to tv or cinema. Recommended for those who enjoy a twisty thriller but even more so for those who like a bit of espionage.

This book was just not that interesting to me, Im sorry.

The Cleaner is a one of a kind blend of mystery and espionage.  It is all the more enticing because the lead is an individual without special skills, technology or backup.  Judith is a cleaner, but she is smart, persistent and determined.

A series of coincidences lead Judith Kepler, a crime scene cleaner, to discover that what she has been told about her origins was completely false. Before the wall fell, she was brought to the Yuri Gargarin Children's Home, assigned a new identity and left to suffer the abuse the home was known for.  Angry and confused why a murdered woman would have her file, Judith begins digging for answers.  Her search angers powerful people, because if the truth comes out it will not only embarrass current German intelligence, it will also bring attention to those who worked for East German intelligence before the wall fell and their crimes.

The story is enthralling, and the translation to English is well done.  I was surprised by the occasional “Americanism” that didn't quite fit, but it never got in the way of my enjoyment of the story.  The Cleaner reminded me a lot of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, not in content but in flavor.

5/5

I received a copy of The Cleaner from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

--Crittermom

The Cleaner Elisabeth Herrmann

What I love about e-books is that they allow me to find Authors from around the world and read their stories. Stories I would never have heard of, or had just been lucky to come across in an Airport bookshop.

The Cleaner by Elisabeth Herrmann came up as a book suggestion following another book I had read. A quick look at Amazon, and Herrmann’s own website, revealed that she is a well published novelist in Germany with many German Edition copies of her books available in the UK, but I think this is the first English copy.

That must change.

This is the story of a child victim of the Cold War, and the adult she became fighting to find out the truth.

1985 and a child is taken to a government run children’s home in East Germany, quickly swallowed by the system she suffers years of institutional abuse, which she extends into her private life as she gets older.

Her name is Judith Kepler, and after struggling with drugs, and self-harming, she gradually gets herself together and becomes a cleaner in the reunified Germany. Her specialism is cleaning crime scenes, moving in after the police and forensic teams have finished an investigation and making the building habitable again.

One such scene see’s Judith cleaning up after the murder of a woman, but she realises that she has a link with this woman and wants to know more.

Her investigations lead her into contact with agents working for the German Security forces, old and new. There is a secret out there that somebody doesn’t want discovering. Old allies are now on different sides, and old allegiances have changed, but this secret has to remain buried.

Who is the woman that was killed in the flat, the investigation leads Judith across Germany and Sweden. Judith’s life is put into danger but it only makes her put more effort into finding the truth.

Why?

Because until she finds out the truth, she won’t know who she is, why she was abandoned in the children’s home. One thing is for sure, what she knows now is false.

The book starts in 1985 and stays there for just the first chapter, moving on to the modern day the reader follows Judith’s actions as she fights to find out the truth. An ordinary woman battling against the power of agents from agencies with a profound interest in keeping the secret in the past.

As she digs deeper she begins to uncover a story of treason and double cross. She needs to know what would have set the wheels in motion that left her in the home; and what was worth so much, that so much subterfuge was used to hide the past

The characters in this book are good, and believable. Judith is one of us, and acting like one of us. She has no secret skills, she is no super hero, she is just getting on with life when things take a vicious turn. You will love her.

People who have read Marnie Riches’ the Girl Who……… series will love this book.

People who have read Ludlum at his best will love this book.

People who are looking for a new thriller author in the UK, this is your woman.

Most of all, anybody who likes a good story, will love this book.

When I first started reading this book, I wasn't sure I could handle the cruelty that I knew was to come. In fact, I had started skipping ahead, more to see what happened than to really read the author's work. But I discovered I did want to go back and read the entire.

The story hearkens back to a Cold War era drama and how old deals and secrets come back to haunt the players later in and in different ways that the could have imagined. There are some complex characters, hard to tell is totally good guys, bad guys or if they shift back and forth.

The horror and pain of little Judith's life is tough to read and makes me recall so many children that have been treated this way. Judith makes is very personal. the life she tries to cobble together works, if not well, keeps her going. A simple mistake of the wrong place at the wrong time pulls a thread that unravels many lives.

There are quite a few characters and players to keep straight, along with shifting allegiances; the initial letter organizations that everyone belongs are are also a bit tough to follow.

The resilience of Judith, her supporters and protecters, as well as that of those that are out to get her is a strong thread throughout. The double, triple and quadruple crosses are a bit depressing, I guess no one really ever tells the whole story.

The violence is tough, lots of dead people.

I did appreciate the skill of the author in invoking situations that I didn't want to read about and envision; her writing kept me intrigued throughout. I am not entirely clear on the ending, but it was not unsatisfying.

A story about a cleaning woman who cleans after serious crimes like murder. She accidentally discovers an agent trying to remove a secret camera from the ceiling fixture while entering a murder victims apartment.

This leads her to try to find out what happened in the apartment. The agent is able to knock her down and make a break. She looks at the camera and essentially says I got you removing the camera. But in Germany during those days who put the camera there, the police , the BND, the secret police or someone else.

Mysteriously a letter arrives at the apartment while she is there and retrieving it discovers it is a secret report on her years as a child in a home. A home she believes her drunken prostitute mother left her shortly before she died. Except maybe not.

This sends Judith on to a path seeking answers long since buried with those in the know trying to keep her from the truth and those betrayed years ago hoping for answers on whole the mole was that sent Judith to the Yuri Gagarin home.

Masterly woven so that the various interests of those involved stayed on edge until the end. A great read. A believable spy novel. A murder mystery all in one. Highly recommend.

This is the first German crime novel I’ve read and it made me feel like I was watching one of those old espionage films. It’s definitely for fans of spy driven novels – think German version of Jack Reacher without as much action or a cute spy you could picture your favorite action star stepping into the role.

The plot line is a clever thriller full of twists you don’t see coming as Elisabeth Hermann did a good job with the mystery and backstory as her research skills showed through quite well. She has a good writing style that flows and keeps you intrigued along with, at times, a bit scared for your safety as it seriously makes you consider how far governments will stretch their reach and resources in the name of justice. A bit of the ends justifies the means kind of thing.

She has a detailed sense in her writing of characters and scenes that are illustrated to just this side of overkill in some areas but stops short of being long-winded. She really pulls you into all of her characters whether they are minor or a major part of moving the story along. She did a good job on characterization as the emotions, motivations and actions of the main character, Judith, seemed credible and reality based but she was also able to do that for the rest as well which was surprising for a spy novel.

If you like some history thrown into your novels then you should enjoy the Cold War aspects with spies, agents, and double agents all waiting to thrill you.

In the 1980’s a worker in an East German orphanage finds a little girl wandering the hall one night. The girl says her name is Christel and that she wants her mommy. But the Stasi officers who visit the orphanage tell the worker that the girl’s name is Judith Kepler, and using some nasty persuasive techniques, they get the woman to go along with their ruse. Years later, Judith has grown up to be a crime scene cleaner – she makes sure that all the mess and gore left behind after a murder or suicide is erased. Bit this murder scene is different, the woman who was killed knew Judith’s real identity. Why was Judith real identity hidden and what really happened all those years ago? The Berlin Wall may have come down, but old tensions and threats still exist, as Judith looks to uncover the truth about her past. As tensions in our modern world increase daily, organizations like the Stasi take on a new and frightening guise. A riveting thriller