Steve Berry takes the reader on a high pace chase around the globe in this historical fiction. All the key characters within the novel have one goal, to sink their teeth into the Amber Room and make sure anyone else who tries to find it are destroyed.

The novel does an excellent job at bringing real life facts about the Amber Room into this fictional dark world- Underground art collectors that will stop at nothing to get what they desire. Berry has done his research and knows the subject he's writing about thoroughly. The problem arise when he clutters the facts with a story filled by diluted & bland characters who the reader never feels attached too.

Throughout the book you are in the eyes of a different person. The main protagonist (if you can call them that) is a recently separated married couple, Rachel and Paul. However, you never once care about the circumstances that happen to them. There are plenty of times Rachel is in danger, but I found myself not caring what happens to her. In fact, I was rooting for the main antagonist of the story, Christian Knoll. A sick, twisted, and lusting man who cares only for himself. Why was I rooting for him? Easy- he was the only character that was interesting. Berry developed him, and you got into the mind and heart of the wicked man. I can't even tell you the last time the reader gets the POV through the villain. Did I like Christian Knoll absolutely not, but I felt like he was the only character fleshed out. I knew I could hate Knoll and that actually allowed me the freedom to be curious about his fate. I was looking forward to seeing what happened to him by the end of the book.

If you love history and you enjoy fiction then give this book a try, but don't expect to fall in love with characters. To put it bluntly, only Christian Knoll is memorable. The rest can die in an airplane explosion on their quest for The Amber Room.

In "The Amber Room" Berry tells the tale of one of the greatest treasures ever crafted by the hand of man, a single room made entirely of amber.

Despite exhaustive efforts by treasure hunters, no one's been able to find it since 1944 when the room was hidden to protect it form the war's destructive bombing raids.

Atlanta judge Rachel Cutler unexpectedly becomes engaged in the search for the room when her father dies under strange circumstances and leaves behind clues to a secret he's kept his whole life. A secret about the Amber Room.

The premise of Berry's story caught my interest, and throughout the reading of it, I was engaged as the story took it's various

Let me just say that this has to be the best Steve Berry novel that I have read to date!

Art historians everywhere would love to know what happened to the Amber Room after it disappeared during WWII. Berry paints a wonderful tale of what might have happened to it in a story that chronicles the adventures of Atlanta judge Rachel Cutler when she travels to Europe to get to the bottom of this mystery after her father Karol Borya, was killed because of what he knew about the Amber Room's whereabouts. Rachel gets mixed up in the race between two European industrialists/art collectors to find the Amber Room, and almost loses her life in the process. The big question is who will find it first, and does it actually exist?

For art history buffs, this novel offers an entertaining and intriguing look at one of the art world's most famous mysteries. I was sitting on the edge of my seat through at least half the novel! If you like this novel, I also recommend Jeffrey Archer.

There was a large cast of characters that took far more concentration to keep them straight until well into the story. However, they all converged and it was an enjoyable book.

I didn't know The Amber Room was missing. I heard of the room but didn't know it's history. The novel is very well plotted. There is action, adventure and some serously ruthless killers. I highly recommend this book

Confession time I found this buried on my Kindle I purchased it in April 2019 and apparently made it to close to 50% before something new and shiny distracted me. So Obviously not having a Eidetic memory I had virtually no idea what was going on ... but I knew enough to know it was dreadful

Within a few chapters I had pieced it all together. There was a divorced American couple Rachel & somebody (Paul) she's a judge he's a lawyer her father was someone involved in WW2 and he was dead possibly murdered and her exhusband's parents were dead- possibly murdered and they were running around Germany with an American explorer who was searching for the infamous Amber Room from Russia / USSR

There are a man and woman trying to kill all of them there is double crossing and triple crossing and legal contracts and just some of the most tortured prose and painful dialogue I have ever read outside of fan fiction.

In the end of the book the author admits he had the book rejected 18 times before it sat in a drawer for almost a decade, it should have stayed there.

O carte buna, un debut promitator. Nu m-a dat, insa, pe spate.

Spre deosebire de cartile lui Dan Brown, unde stateai cu sufletul la gura nu doar pt a vedea daca supravietuiesc personajele, ci si pt a afla secretul, in acest caz secretul era putin important. Era vorba de o camera de chihlimbar, ceva foarte frumos, foarte valoros, pe care o cautau cam toti. Insa gasirea ei nu ar fi schimbat din temelii lumea, asa cum se intampla in aproape toate cartile lui Dan Brown.

Si are si un ritm mult prea lent pt gusturile mele.

Articolul a aterizat #peblog:

https://citestemil.ro/camera-de-chihl...

The Amber Room is a much like the kind of tale I write – an international thriller with an everyman protagonist (in this case, an everyman and everywoman) who gets by with whatever native intelligence and wits he/she brings to the party. It was Steve Berry’s first published novel, one of three he wrote before he drifted into Dan Brown territory with his Cotton Malone series, and as such it still has some mooring in the real world.

The Amber Room is the near-legendary Czarist treasure stolen by the Nazis from the Soviet Union during WWII. The amber-encrusted wall panels disappeared at the end of the war, leaving behind a number of conflicting theories regarding their fate. This much is true. Where Berry comes in: two wealthy art collectors – who steal stolen artworks for their own uses – now compete with each other to find the now-priceless panels. Their henchpeople – one man, one woman, both of course beautiful, sexy, adept sociopaths – canvass the U.S. and Europe for clues to the room’s location.

Enter our protagonists: Paul and Rachel Cutler, he a lawyer, she a judge. Rachel’s elderly father happens to be one of the few people alive who has a handle on the Amber Room’s final stop. When he ends up suddenly dead, Rachel decides to investigate, and Paul decides to follow to keep her out of trouble. That they run afoul of those two beautiful, sexy, adept, sociopathic henchpeople and become deeply enmeshed in the hunt for the Amber Room should come as no shock to you.

The big surprise here isn’t in the plot – if you’ve read enough of these, you’ll have a pretty good idea where things are going before they get there – but in what good company the Cutlers are. They act and think like normal (albeit highly educated) people. Divorced but not hateful, they have lingering feelings for each other, and both are devoted to their children. At one time or another, one or the other is quite ready to stop and go home; I can’t recall Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon ever deciding to say “to hell with it” when the Forces of Darkness gather around him. The Cutlers make mistakes and trust the wrong people and learn from their missteps. And, like real people, they sometimes do things they haven’t thought through and for which they don’t have clear motives. In a genre in which both protagonists and villains always seem to know everything and know how to do everything, it’s enormously refreshing to tag along with characters who don’t make you feel hopelessly ignorant and incompetent.

The henchpeople – Knoll (he) and Danzer (she) – are largely interchangeable, amoral in the usual ways, with roughly similar tastes and proclivities (why is it that in thrillers, the more evil you are, the more and better the sex that you have?). But at least they have reasons for being the way they are, and they’re merely sociopaths and not psychotics. Their masters are also largely interchangeable, wealthy beyond bounds and living in medieval Central European castles bedecked with their ill-gotten loot. The sameness of the antagonists is one of the key failings of this book. The historical downloads are usually motivated and usually end before they get irritating, although characters sometimes repeat themselves. The settings are well-drawn and easily visualized and will look swell in the inevitable Showtime or Starz original movie.

The Amber Room is a fine way to spend a few hours if you’re into search-for-treasure thrillers. It’s like Dan Brown lite, without the attached reading list and with better writing. The protagonists prove that not every thriller hero has to be ex-Special Forces or World’s Foremost Expert in anything, and it’s a nice change to not have the fate of the known universe hanging in the balance. A good time was had by all.

I was told that this author was the new Vince Flynn and when I grabbed a copy, I saw that Dan Brown gave this book high marks. This book is a good mix of Grisham, Follet, Flynn with a little Brown thrown in. At nearly 500 pages, it is not a quick read, but it moves at a great and relatively even pace. The beginning is tough to stomach as the torture of Nazi concentration camps is told in a hauntingly accurate style. The reader is rewarded, however, with a complex plot, regular relief from the concentration camp scenes and a rich stage for an exiting adventure that moves through 2 generations. Well written, academically interesting and creative, I will grab another written by Berry.

I absolutely loved this book! I've been a Dan Brown forever as I love historical fiction and Steve Berry delivers! Interesting characters, fast paced, Lots of real history. I'm hooked!

I gave this book an extra star because of the research put in to it, but I really didn't like it. The father is the best-written character, for whom the reader feels most connection to, but he gets killed off right away. The next-best written characters? The bad guys. And not best-written bad guys. Nope, more interest is paid to them and their relationships than the protagonists, even when they're just killing people indiscriminately. They're written with far more sympathy than the actual protagonists, who, really, seem to make one bad relational decision after another (until the very end, when it all wraps up very neatly). I liked The Romanov Prophecy and the Cotton Malone series sounds interesting, but I'm glad I didn't recommend this for my book club.

Great history lesson without reading non-fiction. I loved learning all about the history of the amber room. I didn’t grow to love any of the characters, but some of them were interesting. Still wondering if the author has met a nice woman.