The Nazi Dagger Incident

While it is heartening to see children's fiction tackling important political and social issues, it must be said that this is not a striking example of the genre. Set in contemporary Berlin and dealing with the rise of Neo-Nazism, the novel opens with teenager Matthew Stirling, visiting the city with his professor father (a 'director of Paranormal Studies') and witnessing an ugly racial attack in the Turkish quarter: it is his well-intentioned determination to intervene which results in their involvement in events where the emphasis is increasingly on pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo. If the aim is to make Neo-Nazism and its adherents look totally absurd, then the book succeeds admirably, but at the price of any measure of narrative credibility.