I enjoyed In The Shadows Of Enigma. I read The Girl From Krakow and was pleased to see there was a sequel. The story was well written and kept my interest. Many thanks.

Rita and Gil Romero are each harboring their own secrets on how they escaped during the war. Those secrets will haunt them many years later. The story starts after WWII in Poland when Rita and Gil decide to move to Australia to start anew. After time, Rita's past starts to catch up with her with both the Russians and the Germans following her to learn her secrets.

The story takes awhile to build and setup the scenario. The first half is a bit slower build focusing on the life of Rita and Gil. The second half of the book things start to come together and we find out a lot more of the secrets when the chase across the world begins.

When I originally picked the book, I was interested because of the Enigma and Bletchy Park. Even though they play a part in the story, they are very minor within the plot. The story takes place in the aftermath of the war, thus the secrets of Bletchy Park are still, well secret. If you are expecting a story showing the work of the codebreakers, this is not the right book.

This is still an excellent story, focusing on the years after the war (1945 to late 60s), making it stand out from the other WWII focused novels. There is a major twist, but it is revealed relatively early in the story with significant hints very early. I enjoyed reading this and look forward to reading other works by this author.

The novel is the sequel to the Girl from Krakow, however, it can be read as a standalone. Reading the original may have filled in a few details that were missing, but the story was understandable without that information.

Thank you to NetGalley and Top Hat books for this advanced reader copy!

The main secret not reveled directly after the ending of WWII was that the Allies had broken the German's secret Enigma Code. They withheld this fact anbd used it to their advantage during the "cold war" that followed WWII.
Those that knew this enormous secret and kept silent were changed forever by the knowledge. This is true of the main character here, Rita Feuerstahl and her husband Gil Romero, along with all the others that held such vital information.
I liked this novel and I didn't like it. I liked that it was a different spin on the WWII theme, I learned about the Enigma Code and about the extent of the espionage/spying on all fronts that went on during the aftermath of WWII. What I didn't like was the slowness of the story development. I almost put it down for good a couple of times, the plot moves along at a snails pace and I found it hard to stay interested or entertained/engaged by it. I also felt that the characters are very one dimensional, there is no substance or depth to them. This also leaves me uninterested at times.
Other than that learning of the Enigma code and of all the spying and treachary that went on after the war was over, learning that it was not really over even when the actual combat stopped was very interesting and enlightening. I would say this novel is worth reading, just don't expect to be entertained by a fast moving plot, expect to look at it as a learning experience.
Thank you to the publisher Top Hat Books and to Net Galley for the free ARC of this novel, I am leaving my honest opinion in return.

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read Rosenberg’s latest novel.

A brilliant novel with a seamless blend of fact and fiction. The truth behind the breaking of the Enigma Code had, eventually, to be made public and the characters in this novel provided a good insight into the espionage of the nations involved. The character of Rita showed her as a young, intelligent, independent and resourceful woman and her fight for survival putting aside the horrors of her past. I found the novel compulsive reading and a ‘sit on the edge of your seat’ ending. For those who enjoy espionage thrillers, this should certainly be amongst those at the top of their reading list. I loved it.

I love a great WW2 or cold war story, it was kind of both. A mention of Bletchley Park and I am sold:-). The plot was fascinating, the characters felt interesting. The book is a good mixture of fiction and non-fiction, a well-written reminder of how lives were changed from one day to the next, sometimes mutiple times in a few months or a year, and that after the war you could never be really sure who the person was standing in front of you. Don't ask so you won't be asked. Don't judge so you won't be judged. These very simple rules could help heal people and this is what we are witnessing through the first 200 or so pages. And then the past catches up and things are changing again, this time driven by past revenges and cold war rules.

I did not like that the story started so slowly, and I wasn't really sure where we are heading until halfway in the book. The heroine did not really have a character development. She felt constant: a calm, calculating force. Still it was good to read and I carried on, though may be slower than my normal reading speed. In hindsight, not all little detail made sense or felt necessary, and the end was neatly (may be too neatly) wrapped up. Still, in terms of new approaches to an old topic, this book ranks pretty high.

This book attracted me because of the title. I was not disappointed, on the contrary, although the book was far more different that I thought it would be. The emphasis is mainly on Rita’s life, starting in 1948, although we learn a lot about her earlier life as she is frequently looking back. And Rita has a lot to look back on. Inexplicably, when living in Poland with her husband and her young son, she narrowly escapes being put on a transport to an extermination camp. The policeman who lets her go, on instigation of his bosses, is Otto Schulke. He had to let her go because Germany was on the brink of losing the war and already many people were trying to appear innocent of what they did in the war. Rita leaves her young son and her husband and starts a new life with Gil Romero, who was her lover earlier in her life. Gil, however, is living under a false name, and it’s not his first. He was trained as a medical doctor in Paris before the war, but he is actually a Catalan. During the war he also worked, for a brief time, in the Russian Red Army.
Life wasn’t so easy immediately after the war. It was not ‘we stop shooting and now we’re all friends again’. Europe was in shambles and nobody trusted each other. The Americans, Brits, Polish and Russians, to name a few, still fought a war over people and land. Spies were everywhere and most people had something to hide. It was not a very pleasant time, with the next war already looming over the heads of people who only just escaped from the previous one.
Rita and Gil move to Australia with their twins and try to build a new life there. Gil as a doctor, and Rita initially as a housewife, but soon she becomes a valuated translator for the many people that arrive in Australia. She discovers her love of languages and during the story in the book she uses this love to educate herself and support her sons.
While we read about Rita’s life, we also get glimpses of ‘the secret’ she is harbouring, without even realizing herself that she is harbouring it. Other people, politicians and spies are trying to figure out what she knows and how they can use her to get an advantage over others, mainly other policemen, politicians and spies.
In the end it all comes together and we leave Rita in peace. Literally.
I just loved this beautiful written story which gives a fascinating insight in the lives of people in those difficult times after the war. It’s a pity the publisher thought it necessary to reveal that Stefan Sajac, reluctant assistant of Otto Schulke, is Rita’s first son. It would have been better to have the reader discover this for himself, because it takes a long time before Stefan and Rita realize that they are mother and son.
Thanks to Netgalley for this review copy.

This imaginative narrative about a woman’s decades long struggle with World War II secrets is an engaging compilation of the many consequences suffered by that war’s survivors.

There are two secrets in In The Shadows Of Enigma. The first, hinted at by the title and then explained in the preface, is that Germany’s secret Enigma code had been cracked by the Polish intelligence service in 1942 and given to the western allies, but not announced for almost thirty years, leaving the Russians to assume, after they’d captured the code in Berlin, that it was still usable. The second secret is that Rita, the novel’s primary protagonist, in 1947 found her son, Stefan, who she’d given to a woman in 1940 to save him from the Nazi roundup of Jews, and that Rita chose not to reveal that she had survived the Nazis, which would have led to Stefan’s return to her, his birth mother. Ignoring the wartime flashbacks, the story’s plot crosses many international boundaries: Austria, France, Spain, Australia, the United States and, at the end, Switzerland. In addition to Rita, there are even more characters than locales, each with a backstory: the main ones being, Schulke, the deNazified, yet deranged, Gestapo man turned German policeman, Gil, Rita’s common law husband, Geoffrey St John, Rita’s classmate at university and years later her boss in an Australian government post, Phil Morton, Rita’s fellow employee at the United Nations, Frania Sajac, Stefan’s foster mother, and, finally, Stefan Sajac, an officer in the German BfV and Rita’s son.

The novel expertly weaves together a complex plot involving its many characters and locations. During the years through which the story moves, many historical events are carefully included, such as the Hungarian uprising against the Russians, the Suez Canal conflict, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which add an element of authenticity to the plot. The characters cross paths repeatedly, but never confusingly, and their interspersed time lines develop an excellent suspense to the story. Yet, character development is not as robust as one would like to see in a literary novel. The many years and different locations are a distraction. One wishes that New York had arrived sooner, and that Australia had been briefer. The number of characters, each given a point of view during the plot, dilutes the presentation of Rita. Would that the reader could learn more about her than her thoughts and feelings that only directly support the plot. In The Shadows of Enigma is billed as a standalone sequel to the author’s The Girl From Krakow. What that means is that Rita’s background is to some extent repeated from the earlier book. The better approach, however, may have been less repetition and more development of Rita’s character from the end of the earlier book. Yes, there are some insights from Rita regarding her past. But so many years pass and insights of her current circumstances are few. These comments are not to say the book is not a great read. On account of its story and suspense, In The Shadows Of Enigma is very enjoyable.

Mark Zvonkovic, Reviewer
https://www.markzvonkovic.com

I'd read The Girl from Krakow so was looking forward to reading another of Rosenberg's book with eager anticipation and I was not disappointed. Firstly, the quality of the writing style was reliably exquisite and I enjoyed reading the language, as much as the story. The story itself was a fascinating insight into the unique challenges of life in post-war Germany from the perspective of Rita, a victim/survivor and a woman. These identities were explored through experiences of her world-wide travel in attempts to escape the past, only to discover that the past cannot be avoided, or hidden from. I particularly liked the way that Rita was written as having immense agency at a time when women's lives (especially in Australia) were generally perceived to have very limited value beyond breeding and house-keeping. Through her quiet persistence and determination, Rita sloughs off whatever holds her back, whilst never really being overtly confrontational or aggressive. There is a theme of leaving, sacrifice and returning that is woven through the novel. I was gripped from beginning to end and only mildly disappointed the 'return' at the end left me with a sense that it was slightly unfinished. But that is personal, and my enjoying was undiminished by this. I can thoroughly recommend