Sullivan writes with absolute dedication and precision, bringing a previously obscure suspect to the fore.

... intermittently gripping.

... a deep dive into life in the Netherlands in the grotesque and difficult year that was 1944. It describes the lives of occupiers and occupied, of perpetrators and victims, of collaborators and those who looked away. For this alone, Sullivan has made a significant contribution, even if the narrative only begins to draw the reader in late in the game, after a long haul through much introductory material, many characters who turn out to be insignificant, and a raft of theories that are raised, then knocked down.

Whatever the eventual verdict, it’s clear that Sullivan’s book struggles to find a form and style that serves her material. In particular she seems uncertain about how much prior knowledge she can assume in her readers, which means that two thirds of this book are spent rehashing the story of the Franks’ murder, and the postwar publication of Anne’s diary. Only once Sullivan moves on to actual 'persons of interest' does the narrative begin to pick up, even though here again much of this information has long been in the public domain.

... badly organized and facilely written; it takes a strikingly uncritical tone toward Pankoke and his team and seems to track every tedious dead end in the investigation. Worse, it offers little historical analysis of life in Amsterdam during the war years, particularly regarding the role of the Jewish Council, whose members made the fatal but understandable gamble of cooperating with the Nazi authorities, hoping that by doing so they could mitigate the worst of the persecution and buy extra time for the Jewish population. My own reading turned up poor annotation and sloppy factual errors, including mischaracterizations of the circumstances around the writing and editing of Anne’s diary.

An extraordinary tale of modern science and old-fashioned gumshoe work applied to a world-renowned crime 80 years after the fact.