Jeffrey Deaver"s thrillers are united by his fascination with people doing what they are good at. Garden of Beasts is separated in time and place from his modern thrillers, but both of its heroes are supremely competent men. The shame is that they are working against each other. Gun for hire Paul Schumann is offered a chance to avoid the electric chair. All he has to do is go to Berlin for the Olympics and take out Ernst, chief of the bureaucrats who is building German"s military might for Hitler. And in Berlin, honest apolitical cop Kohl finds himself on Schumann"s trail without any idea of what he is up to. Deaver is as good here at what an intelligent policeman could do with limited forensic resources as he is in his series about contemporary high-tech criminalist Lincoln Rhyme. Ernst, meanwhile, is caught up in the Third Reich"s vicious infighting and hard at work at a particularly nasty and inventive scheme. This is a splendidly atmospheric historical thriller that wears its research lightly--it is also endlessly inventive in the twists and turns of its characters" movements through a society built on betrayal and sudden death. --Roz Kaveney