By blogging my enjoyable encounters with the books (1, 2) of Alan Furst, I gave my cousins an idea for a gift: The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Score!
A menacing, heartening mystery, set in Berlin as World War II has rattled to a close, The Good German collapses a very personal reunion with the rumblings of geopolitics.
More of a police procedural than a spy story — albeit with a journalist leading the investigation — this novel weaves in the larger realities. Again and again, the mundane details of larger issues are bluntly laid out for review: assigning blame for the Holocaust, the whitewashing of the sins of weapons developers, and the ominously clear rising conflict between the West and the Russians.
And it does all that in prose more direct and readable than my own. 
My thanks for the gift! I never saw the movie made from this book, but now I’m curious.