City of Masks: A Novel of Shanghai

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Valeria Parker

What a gift it is when a novelist brings genuine lived experience to the page. W. Michael Blumenthal was himself a teenage refugee in Shanghai, and that personal history pulses through every chapter of this riveting historical thriller. His protagonist Obermann arrives in WWII Shanghai already on the run, and the city he lands in is exactly as chaotic and dangerous as one might imagine: a teeming crossroads of Allied POWs, Nazi operatives, Japanese military police, Green Gang gangsters, and desperate Jewish refugees all jostling for survival in one of history’s most improbable pressure cookers.

The plot moves fast. Obermann is quickly swept into the orbit of the OSS, recruited for an audacious scheme to undermine the local German and Japanese war effort. What follows is a thriller in the truest sense: a kabuki dance of false identities, narrow escapes, and shifting allegiances in which every trusted contact might be an informant and every plan is one betrayal away from collapse. Blumenthal has a gift for the kind of suspense that comes not from improbable action sequences but from the grinding tension of deception, the constant calculation of who knows what and who can be trusted.

Steffi, the mysterious Jewish refugee who becomes Obermann’s unlikely partner in the story’s final desperate act, is one of the novel’s real pleasures. Her resourcefulness and her stakes in the outcome give the climax an emotional weight that elevates it beyond genre exercise. When the OSS plot unravels and the two of them must somehow reach the Americans while simultaneously protecting Shanghai’s Jewish community from Nazi designs, the reader feels the full moral enormity of what hangs in the balance.

Blumenthal writes with the authority of someone who was there, in spirit if not in every particular, and the result is a thriller that is also a kind of love letter to a vanished city and to the improbable people who survived it.