Warning - contains mild spoilers! 
 I ummed and aahed about what rating to give this. I settled on 2.5 stars, then remembered you can't do half stars, so ummed and aahed a bit more and opted to round up to three stars. 
 This book was a bit odd for me. I love history, particularly World War Two and after. I also love historical fiction. This book seemed to tick both those boxes for me, so I was sure I'd really like it. 
 And that is the strange thing. I did like lots of things about it. He's a good writer, it's an interesting story in an interesting setting. I found the book made me want to continue reading, and I finished it pretty quickly, at least by my usual standards (I don't have the huge commute or sleep disorder which enable some people to read anything at a rate of knots). 
 The story wasn't in any way unbelievable, there was no credibility-stretching stuff in there. I also felt like it did a very good job conveying the horrific mess of Hamburg in 1945 (or, more accurately, Hamburg post the terrible bombing which killed so many people). 
 So, despite all of that, why only 3 (well, 2.5) stars? 
 It just felt a little superficial to me. It was as if the author had painstakingly plotted out the environment his characters would inhabit, and the relationships they would have, yet had paid not enough attention to developing these relationships over time. 
 So, for example, we go from a situation where *and there's a spoiler here* the main female character in the book goes from a frosty resentment of the German in whose house they are living, to having an affair with him in what seems like a matter of a day or two. 
 We go from mistrust and animosity to passion in one jump without passing through any intermediate stages. Not only that, but the affair could be spotted pretty much from the start, it was that predictable. 
 I also felt that some of the characters were pretty cartoonish. The creepy intelligence major and his social climber wife felt particularly cliched to me. The scene with the Russian, American and French military representatives felt to me like it was straight out of the Big Book of National Stereotypes, 1945 edition. I didn't really see the point of Lewis's interpreter at all. The character really went nowhere. 
 The ending of the book felt somewhat like a case of "I've got nothing more to write here, so I'll knock it on the head", as if a convenient way to wrap matters up had been found, and even then, it didn't really seem like a particularly good or conclusive ending. It just felt like the book had run out of steam. 
 A shame, really, I had really wanted to like this book, and although I have read far worse books than this so far this year, this was pretty disappointing stuff.