I’ve been trying to get an audio version of A Trace of Smoke created for years, but only recently re-acquired the rights. Then I faced my first quandary: should Hannah have a German accent when she speaks English? An American one? Or a British one? I decided
READ MORE →At the end of A City of Broken Glass, *spoiler alert* Hannah Vogel was driving out of Switzerland with her son Anton at her side, and Lars Lang was bleeding in the back of the truck with Frau Doktor Spiegel. Berlin was in flames behind them and
READ MORE →It’s no secret that Berlin is my favorite city. After all, I’ve written four Hannah Vogel novels set here. It captured my imagination when I was a teenager here in the 1980s, when the wall was still up, and it’s never let me go. Here’s a list
READ MORE →by Rebecca Cantrell I’ve been strangely silent since I moved to Berlin. Strange for me, anyway. . Maybe it’s the stresses of packing a house that we lived in for a decade, winnowing it down to a storage room and a couple of suitcases, and hopping on
READ MORE →. By Rebecca Cantrell . . Everyone is going to Bouchercon this week but me. Not strictly speaking true, because there are a billion people in China who never even heard of Boucheron, plus nearly everyone I know who isn’t a writer or a mystery fan. But
READ MORE →By Rebecca Cantrell . . Hannah Vogel does manage to infiltrate the cult of all cults: the Nazi party. Let’s run through the cult checklist: overbearing leader, fanatical devotion, mind control, serious consequences if you leave, questions or doubts strongly discouraged. Yes, on all counts. . .
READ MORE →Guilty Pleasures . By Rebecca Cantrell . What’s the guiltiest pleasure on my bookshelf? . I’m vaguely guilty about all the stacks of books I have that won’t even fit onto my shelves, but not enough to give them top billing. Because, really, they’re just a sign
READ MORE →Sorry for the lateness of today’s post. I just got back from the Tucson Festival of Books and collapsed in an exhausted, dried up husk instead of writing my blog post. Today’s topic? What’s on my reference shelf? I have all the standard writing books on the
READ MORE →Your protagonist blows a tire on a deserted road. When she checks for the spare, she finds the body of a young girl (mid-teens.) What does she do? Living in Berlin in the 1930s with a small income, Hannah doesn’t have a car. In “A Trace of
READ MORE →What artist, living or dead, would you want to do your cover design? By Rebecca Cantrell I was walking through a little gallery in Kona the other day. Usually the paintings they carry have tropical themes—whales, flowers, waves, cottages in the moonlight—and often I come across something
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