Isle author delves into Berlin, 1938

Hawaii island resident Rebecca Cantrell struck gold in 2009 when her first novel, "A Trace of Smoke," the story of German journalist Hannah Vogel and her investigation of her brother’s death in pre-Hitler Berlin, was picked up by a national publisher.

Cantrell’s second meticulously researched novel, "A Night of Long Knives," put Vogel in the middle of the Nazi Party purge of 1934 when the conservative wing destroyed the radicals. The third, "A Game of Lies," takes place during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Her latest novel follows Vogel through "Kristallnacht" ("Crystal Night"), the Nazi-organized attacks on Jews and Jewish property that took place in 1938 after a Polish Jew whose family was deported from Germany assassinated a German diplomat in Paris.

Cantrell is in Berlin doing research for her fifth Hannah Vogel novel and responded by email to our questions about her successful series.

Question: Is it easier or more difficult to maintain creative momentum several books into a successful series?

Answer: It’s easier in that I know the characters very well, and the books have given me time to explore their lives in a way I couldn’t have done in the first book. For Hannah Vogel, the main character, each book has made her life more complicated. She is carrying different burdens because of her actions in the previous books, and I like watching that. … It’s harder in that we are aiming straight for World War II and the Holocaust now, so each book is more painful to research.

Q: You cover the complex events that led up to Kristallnacht in a straightforward and objective manner. Do you think the background to Kristallnacht is fresh information for many Americans?

A: I don’t think that the conditions in the Polish refugee camps, the very thing that led to Herschel Grynszpan’s shooting of the German diplomat (Ernst vom Rath) and Kristallnacht, have been shown much in literature and on film. Likewise, the more I researched, the more I realized how intensely personal the events of Kristallnacht were. It wasn’t just storm troopers breaking shop windows and burning down synagogues. It was about neighbors who had joined the Nazi Party going into their Jewish neighbors’ houses to humiliate them and destroy their possessions.

Q: Can you reveal where Hannah will be in the fifth book?

A: Book five is tentatively titled "A Time of Night and Fog," and it’s set in Israel in 1940. Hannah is smuggling Jewish children from Europe to Palestine. I know, it’s odd that I moved to Berlin to write the first Hannah Vogel novel not set in Berlin. Apparently, I must do everything the hard way.