Confession. I am an avid fan of all of Joseph Kanon's works. SHANGHAI is one of his best. An engrossing historical fiction mystery which plays like a black and white film noir.. Fast moving and suspenseful overflowing with real characters. Needless to say I enthusiastically recommend SHANGHAI.

I did not enjoy the writing style. Too much of the book was written in dialog. Abandoned. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Published by Scribner on June 25, 2024

Having relied on Berlin and Istanbul to provide noir atmosphere in earlier novels, Joseph Kanon turns to another classic setting for espionage novels: the city of Shanghai. Shanghai is set in the 1930s. Wars are breaking out, Germany and Japan are both set on world domination.

Daniel Lohr is a Berliner. Because he is Jewish, his life is in danger. His father has already been taken away. Daniel’s uncle Nathan in Shanghai buys him a first-class ticket on a ship that is crowded with refugees. Daniel’s property is confiscated by Nazis, apart from the ten marks with which he will start his new life.

On the trip to Shanghai, Daniel meets Leah Auerbach, an Austrian who sells her expensive coat at a bargain price to an affluent passenger so that she will have some money to support her aging mother. He also meets Yamada, a member of Japan’s secret police who has his eye on Leah. Other significant characters are communists: Florence, an American passenger on the ship who is too open about her political beliefs, and Tomas (rebranded as Karl in Shanghai), who knew Daniel in Berlin.

Daniel was part of a secretive group of communists in Germany. He isn’t particularly ideological, but he saw communism as an alternative to fascism. He hoped that the group would kill Nazis but he left Germany before he had a chance to make that hope a reality. In Shanghai, he resists overtures to continue helping the communist cause. Communism now is about Russia and Daniel only ever cared about Germany.

Daniel instead turns his attention to two jobs. He sells gossip to the entertainment editor of the local newspaper while helping Nathan operate his casino. To stay in business, Nathan needs to pay squeeze to the Japanese police or Chinese gangs (or both) who assure that Shanghai lives up to its reputation for corruption.

Shanghai politics will eventually drive the plot. As Yamada says, Shanghai makes strange bedfellows. Japan is confident that it will conquer China and come to control Shanghai. Until then, the Japanese are warlords who demand tribute. China is confident that it will outlast Japan. The Chinese have patience learned from centuries of watching one dynasty replace another. Refugees from the Nazis have flooded into Shanghai but often can’t get visas to go elsewhere. The various factions in Shanghai enter into shifting alliances as they try to protect their own interests.

Nathan has Daniel swing a partnership in a new casino with the Chinese, where Yamada will be a silent owner in lieu of paying squeeze. That deal does work out as well as Nathan hope. Violence in the club causes Daniel to return his attention to the communist cause as an alternative to the seemingly inevitable Japanese rule of Shanghai.

A love story is buried in the plot, but it isn’t a story of romance. Nor is Shanghai a traditional spy story, although spies lurk everywhere in the city. While the story defies categorization, it might best be understood as a story about what people will tell themselves to preserve their self-esteem as they struggle to survive. It is also a story about starting over. Some characters start over repeatedly because they have no better choices. You do what you must to survive, but sometimes you do what you can to make life better for someone else.

The story culminates with Daniel’s complicated but credible plan to save Leah and Nathan and maybe even himself from becoming collateral damage in an inevitable Shanghai war between the Japanese military and Chinese gangs. Whether the plan will succeed is the question that gives the novel its suspense. That suspense is considerable as the plot tightens.

Implementing the plan will require more than one character to engage in violence. Kanon invites the reader to weigh the benefit of the violent acts against the guilt that empathic people feel when they cause harm to others. Even if the people who are harmed might have earned their fates, living with the consequences of self-preservation might be a life-changing experience. Guilt makes people into someone new. The time characters spend in Shanghai “had done something to them that couldn’t be undone, or they had done it to themselves.”

Shanghai works on multiple levels — as a love story, an historical drama, a low-key espionage story — but it is more than the sum of its parts. The plot’s resolution leaves doors open to avoid the predictable happy ending I feared. The historical and geographic setting will help the reader stay engaged with Shanghai, while sympathetic characters and the risks they face will assure that the reader continues to turn the pages.

RECOMMENDED

Shanghai
Joseph Kanon
reviewed by Lou Jacobs

readersremains.com | Goodreads

Multiple award-winning author Joseph Kanon dazzles with another gritty noir tale, blending historical fiction with an intriguing crime thriller. The setting is 1939 Shanghai, a tumultuous city wracked with crime, squalor, and political upheaval. Yet it is probably the only refuge for European Jews fleeing the Nazi horde.
It requires no entry visa and welcomes all comers to cope with the warring factions. The world is on the precipice of World War II—the Japanese occupy China, with a puppet government in Nanking, while Chiang Kai-shek nominally runs the government in exile. The Shanghai Municipal Police constantly war with the local crime bosses as vice and violence pervade the streets. All the while, the Communists desperately try to insinuate themselves into the political machinations. After the sudden violence and awakening call of Kristallnacht (1938), the European Jews clearly see their imminent demise.
Daniel Lohr, our main protagonist, is a journalist who has a nominal presence in a Communist cell embedded in Berlin and has recently been exposed. Being half-Jewish, he feels the noose tightening as his Jewish father is rounded up and executed at Sachsenhausen. Having a gentile mother is certainly not helpful under the Nazi race laws. He barely escapes the clutches of the Gestapo when he receives a first-class ticket aboard the Lloyd Company ocean liner headed for Shanghai, provided by his estranged Uncle Nathan. Aboard ship, he will meet others who will become intricately woven into his future dilemmas in Shanghai. He becomes embroiled in a shipboard romance with Leah Auerbach, who is traveling with her elderly mother. He’ll dine with Florence Burke, a seemingly flighty rich matron who will be instrumental in sustaining the Jewish community of Shanghai. And, most importantly, the self-important and slimy Colonel Yamada, the liaison of the Japanese Military Police, better known as the Kempeitai (the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo). Immediate shipboard tension and gamesmanship arise with the stakes being the attention of lovely Leah. All will enter this city of squalor, glamour, and crime without a passport, ten marks, and one suitcase of clothes. How they will survive and prosper will depend on navigating many moral choices and dilemmas.
Daniel will be met warmly by his estranged uncle, who runs a casino, nightclub, and brothel. He will have his morality severely tested as he faces the reality of what must be done to survive in this tumultuous situation. To survive, his uncle is in bed with several of the most powerful crime bosses, each with varying agendas. It’s necessary to walk a tightrope to coexist with the puppet government, the local police, and now the Kempeitai, all wanting a handout, vernacularly referred to as “the squeeze.” Daniel reluctantly becomes his uncle’s valued assistant, rising in prominence and becoming known and respected amongst the various factions in the criminal underworld. He will become ensnared in the maze of politics and crime. Things are further complicated when he sees that Leah has chosen her way to survive by becoming Yamada’s mistress. Daniel cannot tolerate the smirking Yamada.
Kanon is masterful in weaving multiple plot lines, along with precise and intriguing dialogue, to ramp up the mystery and intrigue into a page-turning, exhilarating denouement. The reader will develop a distinct relationship with the motivations of these multi-layered characters. This will prove to be a foreshadowing of the events to come in this horrendous time in history. The chaos of the time is a palpable character in this riveting tale.
Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner Publishing for providing an Uncorrected Proof in exchange for an honest review. After enjoying this marvelous multidimensional tale, the reader will want to delve into Kanon’s masterful oeuvre of fiction.

Could not put this book down once I started. Definately just wanted more and more. Highly recommend.

This book was ok. I was interested in what Shanghai was like during WWII. With so many ports closed to Jewish refugees, Shanghai, a self governing Western entity, was open to refugees. But the Japanese were occupying the country and everyone knew that eventually Shanghai would fall. Daniel Lohr has escaped, but like all the refugees, is penniless and without a passport. (The Nazis kept them.) Daniel's uncle awaits him, and Daniel must decide what he will do to survive.

When your survival is on the line, you will do things you never thought you would.

Daniel Lohr is German and the son of a Jewish father and gentile mother which, in 1939 Berlin, means his life is in a precarious place. Kristallnacht has happened; his father, a distinguished judge, is first removed from his job and later thrown into a camp where he will die. Daniel’s anger at what the Nazis are doing to his country and his people have led him to become an unofficial part of a Communist-affiliated resistance group, but when its members are captured, tortured and made to reveal the names of their co-conspirators, Daniel knows he has to leave Germany immediately or else his life will be forfeit. He is fortunate that his Uncle Nathan, his father’s black sheep brother living in Shanghai (the only port that is still accepting Jewish people) has been able to procure both a first class boat ticket and exit visa for him, if he can make it safely to Trieste to board the ship. At the docks he is given a small package by an associate of his uncle’s to deliver to whomever meets him when he disembarks in Shanghai. What choice does he have but to take it, as a favor to the man who has just saved his life? This will not be the last unsavory choice Daniel will have to make. While on board, he meets other Jews headed to Shanghai, including Leah Auerbach and her widowed mother Clara, fallen from their previous privileged life and reduced to selling their nicer clothes to fund a new life, and Florence Burke, a somewhat frivolous but friendly American returning from her European travels to rejoin her husband who works in Shanghai. As Jews, they are seated at a table together, separated from all of the other passengers except for Colonel Yamada, an officer in the Kempeitai (the Japanese Military Police) who is similarly deemed by the shipping line and other passengers to be socially undesirable. Once they arrive in Shanghai, however, Yamada will be in a position of great power….the Japanese have conquered the Chinese, and as such are technically the ruling entity there. Yamada makes clear his interest in Leah, but it is with Daniel that she indulges in a shipboard flirtation. Getting to Shanghai is one thing, but surviving there without money or contacts is something else again. Nathan meets Daniel at the dock with his bodyguard Sergei, and offers him a home and an invitation to work with him in his nightclubs. Leah and her mother have no one and nothing, and are brought to the Jewish dormitory for refugees. Both Daniel and Leah find that there are things that each thought they would never do which are frequently done by many in their new world, and that they will gradually cross those lines as they work to ensure their own survival and that of their loved ones. For Daniel, it will mean entering the world of gangsters, gambling, nightclubs and bribery (the “squeeze”), balancing competing Chinese gangs and Japanese officials to stay alive and remain prosperous. For Leah, a beautiful young woman with a physically and mentally fragile mother to support and few options open to her, becoming the mistress of a wealthy or powerful man is the best choice among bad ones. Forces within China are competing with one another even as the Japanese begin exerting more power over them all. As the global war continues to escalate, Shanghai will not remain the safe harbor it has been for Americans and European, Jewish or not….will Daniel, Leah and those around them recognize the danger and get out before it is too late, or will they have escaped Germany only to be trapped and die here?
Set in the exotic and glamorous world that was Shanghai, a city “dancing on the rim of a volcano” as one character puts it, this is a WWII thriller where Germany is rendered an indirect threat, although it provided the impetus for the main characters to end up in this locale. Daniel is a man whose life has been destroyed, unable to pursue the profession for which he had trained and losing his father to a force against which he had no power. He fought back by aligning with the Communists, but that did not stop the Nazis rise and almost cost him his life. He knows that Nathan’s life is one of dubious morality, one of which his father did not approve, but will choose survival over morality. Leah, who even before she left Germany had discovered how changed her life had become and how she must compromise herself and her reputation, does what has to be done in this new place as well. Daniel struggles with the choices she makes, but hardly occupies the moral high ground. Florence surprises them all, as she is perhaps not the empty headed socialite that she appears to be. Fold in the ambitious, manipulative Yamada, a gossip columnist/blackmailer, and White Russians who escaped the Communists and have carved out roles in the world of Shanghai, and the reader has a fascinating array of well-formed characters. The drama inherent to the unrest in this outpost of China that believes itself to be self-ruling as the forces backing either communists Mao Zedong or nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek battle for dominance even as Japan successfully invaded the country is well-explained, as Nathan”s and Daniel’s fortunes are dependent upon keeping those three forces in some sort of balance, All in all, a well-written thriller that will appeal both to readers of author Joseph Kanon’s previous novels (which I also recommend highly) as well as fans of Paul Vidich, Alan Furst and Dennis Lehane. Many thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for allowing me early access to this excellent read featuring a unique WWII backdrop.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC of this novel. Definitely one of my favorites this year. Running from Berlin and the Nazis, Daniel Lohr escapes to Shanghai, where his black sheep of an uncle runs nightclubs and consorts with gangsters. Daniel, discovering quite a bit of the gangster inside of himself, fits in a little too easily and works out the politics of the Chinese (nationalists vs communists and rival gangs), the occupying Japanese and the Westerners trying to keep the money flowing while the world falls around their ears. Meanwhile, a Jewish ghetto is growing and Daniel has to work out what his own political convictions are, if any. Of course, there is a beautiful woman always just out of reach (the sex is surprisingly steamy for a WWII historical thriller). This is such a classic historical noir, with snappy dialogue and an atmosphere that makes you feel like you are there. It is paced extremely well. So happy to have found this author and this book. I will go back and read his earlier books now.

I’ve read a lot of books, fiction and non-fiction, about World War II and the Holocaust. I knew that the city of Shanghai, in China, was a refuge for thousands (over 20,000) of Jews fleeing Germany during the Nazi era. When so many other countries required entry visas that were hard to get, Shanghai was wide open. And it was a cosmopolitan city, full of many different nationalities. It was also renowned as a center of vice, filled with nightlife, liquor, drugs and crime.

Kanon, all of whose books I’ve read, has chosen Shanghai as his newest location for his stories of 20th-century Jewish characters. His main character is Daniel Lohr, who has to flee Nazi Germany after his father is killed by the Nazis during Kristallnacht and his anti-fascist political group is broken up. During the later 1930s, for a Jew to get an exit visa from Germany required leaving with almost nothing. Daniel’s boat fare has been paid by his uncle Nathan, a longtime resident of Shanghai, who is a well-known figure in the world of those owning nightclubs, casinos, and brothels.

Daniel becomes involved in Nathan’s business, which allows him to learn all about the complicated and dangerous relationships between immigrants to Shanghai, the Chinese, and the Japanese who are semi-occupiers at that point. Colonel Yamada of the Japanese Kempeitai (equivalent to the Nazi Gestapo) has a finger in various vice world pies, and has made a mistress of Leah Auerbach, a young woman and fellow Jewish refugee whom Daniel fell for on the boat to Shanghai. Complications galore!

Other than establishing the origins of the story, the Nazis are not much of a factor in this book. Neither is the Jewish refugee experience gone into in anything other than the scantiest details. This is really a suspense thriller set in an exotic location, where the shifting alliances and disregard for human life and dignity force Daniel to quickly develop a keen calculating eye and a willingness to act ruthlessly. I realized at about halfway through that this story resembles The Godfather, with its relationship between Daniel and his mobbed-up uncle, and scenes not far from the Mafia families’ battles in the movie. This isn’t Kanon’s best, but it’s an entertaining read.

3.5 stars, rounded to 4.

As the Jews fled the Germans.there were few doors open to them. With their passports and possessions confiscated, Shanghai became a last refuge where visas were not required. When Daniel Lohr’s resistance group was rounded up he knew that his time was running out. Rescue came from his Uncle Nathan, who left Germany years earlier. Nathan arranged a first class cabin on a ship to Shanghai where he has an interest in several clubs and casinos. On the voyage, Daniel meets Leah Auerbach and her mother. What begins as a flirtation becomes an affair that Leah insists will end on their arrival, but Daniel is not ready to let her go. Also sailing is Colonel Yamada, a member of the Kempeitai, Japan’s intelligence service. As Daniel becomes involved with Nathan’s businesses, Yamada becomes a constant threat. When Daniel once again finds Leah Yamada also comes between them. Daniel believes that he was the only survivor of his resistance unit, so he is surprised to find Karl providing medical assistance to the refugees. As a member of the communist party, Karl is hoping that he will join the party’s fight against the Japanese.

Daniel was a journalist in Berlin. Nathan at first arranges a position for him with the local newspaper, but Daniel feels an obligation to join Nathan, who treats him like a son. It is a real education for him. Squeeze must be paid to Yamada for protection.. there is gang violence, drugs and corruption. Nathan realizes that their time in Shanghai may soon come to an end. While he grooms Daniel to take over the business, he is also arranging new identities, personal histories and passports to enable escape when war comes. This is a beautifully crafted suspenseful thriller. If you are a fan of Casablanca then Shanghai is a must read. I would like to thank NetGalley and Scribner Publishing for providing this book.

Complex, intriguing!

Wonderful expose of Jews trying to leave Europe prior to Hitler taking complete control. Shanghai is the only port not requiring entry visas.
Daniel Lohr, a Jew, leaves Germany bound for Shanghai, to join his uncle. Uncle Nathan has been running a nightclub with a sideline in gambling. The relationship between Daniel’s father Eli and his brother Nathan is intriguing. We are given fascinating snippets of their lives, pictures from which we must deduce what’s happening.
That’s the tone of this biting thriller. Bits and pieces are leaked to us. We infer much. Like real life we don’t see all the factors at first glance.
Daniel had been an unregistered member of the communist party. His cell had been compromised, fortunately he wasn’t. He barely escapes Germany.
On the ship he meets a cross section of people he’ll run into again in Shanghai. Leah whom he has a voyage only relationship with, Florence a member of the Jewish community in Shanghai and a compatriot of Madame Chiang, and Colonel Yamada, the head of the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, a Gestapo like organization.
Uncle Nathan is opening a new casino with the two main gang leaders in Shanghai. Daniel takes up the mantle of beloved nephew, as close as a son. He becomes his uncle’s trusted right hand.
Yet the past flows through Shanghai, danger is ever present and Daniel knows to show an unconcerned face, even as the communists want to use him, the triads kill him, and Colonel Yamada destroy him.
As Daniel peels away one face of Shanghai he’s greeted by another.
Best to leave, but when?
The ending is either filled with hope or despair. I cannot tell. It actually doesn’t matter. Shades of greys like Casablanca. The story unfolds “through a glass darkly” and I was caught up in that whirlwind half light.
A gritty tragic novel, a different aspect of people escaping Germany, bound for an alternative to the US—Shanghai, where the Japanese are playing a waiting game. The type of tale Kanon excels in.

A Scribner ARC via NetGalley.
Many thanks to the author and publisher.
(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)

Wow. Phew. After the last quarter or so of that book I am feeling stressed and honestly had to go for a walk, my emotions are HIGH. It did not turn out at all what I had expected, the story taking so many turns and leaving the reader pretty uncomfortable the entire time. The atmospheric writing was SO WELL done as the tension, unease and mistrust were so pervasive and hard to shake even for the reader outside the story. This was a character driven story with so many interesting players and yet, it also did an amazing job of dropping you in this pretty unexplored area during this time period (at least for me). It is heavy, I didn't realize how emotionally invested I was until a few times when I audibly gasped or yelled, and I think that's because the author isn't trying to win you over with his characters, just really present them in their raw form.

Definitely recommend this one!

In 1938, as Jews are being led away to their death by a brutal Nazi regime, Daniel Lohr, a Jewish resistance fighter, barely escapes with his life when there is a warning of Nazi penetration of the resistance. Most nations have closed their doors to Jewish refugees.Shanghai remains an exception, ruled by the Japanese,and having no visa requirements for foreigners. Finding himself on a ship bound for Shanghai, Daniel meets A Japanese officer, Colonel Yamado and Leah Auerbach, would be heiress to a high end glove business, now just another Jewish escapee from torture and death.

Daniel’s uncle, Nathan Green, awaits Daniel’s arrival in Shanghai where he has been living the high life for many years. Much the opposite of Daniel’s father, Nathan has become an important force in Shanghai’s underworld of corruption. As Daniel’s very existence becomes entwined with his uncle’s, he must decide in which world his destiny lies. Complications arise when Leah is courted by the powerful Yamado , who holds her well being and very life in his hands. Does Daniel have the wits or a power to move mountains?

The basic story is historical fiction at its finest. Although I was aware that Shanghai had become a haven for Jewish refugees, I was unaware of the culture, politics, back story and intrigue that was part of life in that internationally famed city. Detailed, beautifully descriptive, with dialog that made me feel a part of the setting and drama , Shanghai is a captivating, interesting and superbly written novel. My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an advance reader’s copy in exchange for my honest review. Publication date is June 25, 2024. You’ll want to read this.

I am not going to post a review of this book.

It was the first book of Kanon’s I have read. I had high expectations based on what I had read/heard about his previous novels, especially Los Alamos. I was particularly attracted to this one by the promise of intrigue and suspense in a dangerous setting and time.

But the book disappointed me. Everything about it seemed superficial. I felt I was reading a story treatment for a 1930s B movie.

I think I was supposed to feel sympathy for Daniel and Leah: the grim situation in Germany that put them on board the ship; their desperate need for each other established by their first second of eye contact and then their tense romance on the ship. But I felt that their shipboard liaison was a plot device. It would make their forced separation, once they arrived in Shanghai, the first suspenseful element in the plot: would they find each other again? Would they live happily ever after? (I confess that I did want both questions to be answered “yes.”)

Shanghai itself was not described very well. We mostly saw it from inside a moving car. It seemed simply to be a dramatic backdrop. Most of the scenes there were indoors and could have been set in nightclubs, gambling establishments, apartments, and cafes that really could have been anywhere.

And then there were the stock villains: the evil Japanese officer, the scheming and murderous Chinese gangsters. I guess I was supposed to find them interesting because they had—perhaps—never appeared before in this kind of novel. But they felt familiar to me from 1930s (mostly B movies). The Japanese colonel seemed like a rewrite of Major Strasser in Casablanca. (Speaking of Casablanca, the passports in this book brought to mind the letters of transit in the movie. Granted, they were a necessary—and historically accurate—plot element in both stories. Still, . . . )

I felt that the action scenes were perfunctory. Yes, the shootout in the car was foreshadowed. Yes, it was unexpected when it did happen. But for me it happened too soon. It prevented me from getting to know Nathan better. He—along with Florence—were my favorite and, I thought, the most interesting, characters in the book. Yet the author effectively killed off Nathan before I hardly knew him.* And then he killed off Florence, mainly, in my opinion, to advance the plot. Was she killed simply because she was a Communist? It was unclear to me.

Ivan, though, was clearly your standard hardline Stalinist. I guess he was there to show us that the Communists were as bad as all the other villains in the book. (In equal measure Mao and Chiang also showed up in the book as mostly villainous. I realize that the author could not write the book without at least mentioning them. I also realize it would have taken up too much space—slowed down the plot—to treat them as real people.)

The shootout in Leah’s/Yamada’s apartment was an easy way to wrap-up the story. We see, once again, having seen it earlier in the car shootout, that Daniel was pretty handy with a gun. Where did he learn that? But, unlike Rick in Casablanca, he was not the one to kill-off the evil officer. Instead that role was given to Leah. (Daniel and Leah’s “stolen” night in the hotel reminded me of Rick and Ilsa’s “stolen” night at “Rick’s Café.”) If Ilsa had been the one to kill Major Strasser at the airport, that would made her a flawed heroine and then she really would have been more suited to stay with Rick rather than leave with the truly heroic Victor Laszlo. By having Leah, already a flawed heroine, then damage herself even further by killing someone (granted, an evil someone), it made sense—in retrospect—that the book would end with Daniel realizing he would never see her again.

So, again unlike Rick, the anti-hero of Casablanca, Daniel, the anti-hero of Shanghai, is left alone at the end, with not even a guy like Louis Renault as a companion.

I guess I should not have requested this galley. I really wanted to like and be able to praise this book. I really do like this kind of book—for instance, Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, and Graham Greene’s “entertainments.”

I am sure this one, like all of Kanon’s previous books, will have an appreciative—and appreciable—readership. But it did not engage or impress me, and I do not see the point of posting a less-than-enthusiastic review.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it.

*I underlined this from Nathan:
“A Communist. At the Rush. Christ. The ones I knew, you could never do business with them. They’re like the Orthodox, they have an idea. And you’d better have the same one.”

I loved this book because it is set in Shanghai during Japanese occupation. Usually people write about the awful things that happened in Nanking; this was an entirely different situation. The characters were compelling; Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany making a new life. Action, mystery, love…covered all the bases. A page turner.

Shanghai's role in protecting Jews during World War II has long been known. I've visited the Jewish Refugee Museum in Shanghai and seen the area in which most of the Jewish refugees lived and worked. Joseph Kanon provides a different take on Shanghai at that time, using his prodigious skills as a story teller to offer readers the story of the gangs and gang wars during the period, all set within the context of colorful night life. Kanon is at his best in this novel and his fans will rejoice at the chance to read it.

Prepare for the classic vibes from 1940 movies…. here’s looking at you Casablanca! Daniel Lohr is fleeing Trieste on one of the last ships heading to Shanghai. He is fleeing 1938 Europe where as a Jew and possible activist, he has been targeted by the Nazis. Onboard the ship there is romance (an enigmatic Leah) and danger (Yamada from the Japanese secret police). When the ship docks in Shanghai Daniel is met by his uncle, Nathan Green. He introduces Daniel to the nightclubs, gambling, and lawlessness of a city where fortunes can made or lost. Alliances are constantly shifting, and every move could be the last one. A fast read with thrills, mysteries, high stakes, and atmosphere. Highly recommended. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this title.

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon

I have read all of Mr. Kanon’s previous books. They all rand from Very Good to Excellent. I would put this one in the Very Good Group.
This book like all his others takes place in a very specific and interesting location. I believe in most if not all cases he was able to spend quite a bit of time in these locations even if the period of the book is from a different era. In the case of this book, I am not sure he was able to spend time in Shanghai. The book takes place around 1936 when the Japanese control much of China’s East Coast but at this point have not yet taken over Shanghai and it is before Pearl Harbor so the US and European citizens are mostly safe in the International Quarters of the city.
The story is about a German Jew ( Daniel) who is able to leave Germany with 10 Marks and one suitcase on a ship from Trieste to Shanghai with a 1st class ticket from his Uncle (Nathan) who runs some gambling and night clubs in Shanghai. On board the ship he meets two characters who will play important roles in the story. Clare a Jew like Daniel with 10 Marks and her suitcase and Col. Yamada of the Japanese Kempeitai.
These three along with Mr. Wu and Mr. Xi Gang Leaders in Shanghai and partners with Nathan will come together to form the story about love, and greed where it is a question of who will survive and how. The key final scene is like many a mystery where Daniel, Yamada and Xi all have guns aimed at each other in a room while Clare watches. Who will live? No spoiler here and will anyone get the girl.
If I have one quibble is there is a character Loomis who edits a gossip column on the paper by going to all the night clubs. I wish his part would have been expanded to include somehow bringing into the story that not only do Clare and Daniel know that life and the music in Shanghai will soon end but also some of the business men and their wives know as well.
Otherwise, a very good read.

"Shanghai" by Joseph Kanon reminded me in some ways of the WWII spy novels of Alan Furst. They share a similar mix of cynicism and romanticism, as well as impeccable depictions of time and place and the presence of female characters who veer a bit too closely to wish fulfillment for my liking. The plot of "Shanghai" was somewhat less convoluted than those of Furst's Night Soldiers novels, though by no means straightforward. There were one or two out-of-character moments that seem entirely plot dictated, but overall I enjoyed the gradual reveal of the layers of the characters and the circumstances. I also appreciated what seems to be a novel setting—the titular Shanghai—for a WWII-era story.

Thank you, Scribner and NetGalley, for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a typical, good Joseph Kanon tale with many intriguing and complex characters and a terrific historical setting.
I gave it the following SCORE:
Setting: Shanghai, China, 1939
Characters: Daniel Lohr, European Jew who escapes the Gestapo on a ship to Shanghai, his uncle, Nathan, who has arranged for the transportation, Leah Auerbach, an enigmatic woman Daniel meets on the ship, and a supporting cast of politicians and gangland criminals in the Shanghai underground
Overview: Daniel is the heir apparent to his uncle’s casinos and is expected to learn the ropes and eventually take over. Thankful to escape the increasingly unsafe environment in Germany, he doesn’t realize the dangerous position he finds himself in a politically unstable Shanghai that is threatened by the looming Japanese takeover.
Recommendation: I rate this book 4 stars
Extras: The plot gets convoluted and, at times, hard to keep track of the characters and where their allegiances lie, but the background of Shanghai history and mystery make this a worthwhile read.
Thanx to NetGalley and Scribner for the opportunity to provide this candid review