This decidedly noir trilogy about the misadventures of a Nazi-era private detective in Berlin, Bernhard Gunther, harkens back to the novels of Raymond Chandler, from everything I've ever read about Raymond Chandler. But to be honest, if the debt to Chandler had been the only noteworthy thing abou...
I was reading the Bernie Gunther series by the year the books are set in, and then Philip Kerr messed up my attempted timeline with two books that sneakily combined prewar and postwar plots. First, "The One From the Other" (book #4 in the series) turned out to have an intro section set in 1937, w...
Dit boek gaat over een Duitse politieman. Het speelt in 1932 in Berlijn en in 1950 in Argentinië. In Berlijn probeert de hoofdpersoon de moord op te lossen op een 14-jarig meisje. Nazies en de opkomst van Hitler maken alles heel moeilijk. Ook de jodenvervolging start in deze tijd. In Argentinië i...
Another solid offering in the Bernie Gunther series. There's no doubt that Gunther is a complicated "hero," and that comes out more in this book than the others I've read. It absolutely makes him interesting, but he is morally ambiguous. I enjoyed the setting of the book, focusing on the lead-up ...
Winner of the Historical Dagger and #6 in this series, this book never gets beyond tepid. The atmospheric pieces and characters are there but the plot is just not much. I like mysteries that are also thought provoking (e.g. Louise Penny's Three Pines series), but they still need to have a myste...
I was initially skeptical about reading this book due to it clearly being about horses and having never been a 'horse' person. However as soon as I started reading it, it became clear that it was about much more than that. It is a tale of survival, endurance, loyalty, finding a family in those ar...
Quite a refreshing read. This author is not afraid to try new things and changes around the trappings of the long established detective genre, with mixed results. We follow Jake, a protagonist we can freely call a militant lesbian since the author himself does exactly that. To my great relief thi...
Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy—featuring the tough, fast-talking, noirish detective Bernie Gunther—is a publishing phenomenon that continues to win new fans more than fifteen years after its initial publication. Kerr has brought Bernie back in a highly anticipated thriller that will delight fa...
Good: A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dust cover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels.Some of o...
Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliantly innovative thriller-writer," Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries that are nothing short of spellbinding. In this second book of the Berlin Noir trilogy, The Pale Criminal brings back Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who tho...
Bernhard Gunther is a hard-boiled Berlin detective who specializes in tracking down missing persons--mostly Jews. He is summoned by a wealthy industrialist to find the murderer of his daughter and son-in-law, killed during the robbery of a priceless diamond necklace.Gunther quickly is catapulted ...
Berlin 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just eighteen months but already Germany has seen some unpleasant changes. As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympics, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organisations - a blatant example of discrimination. Forced to resign as a homi...
The minister limped into his office in the Leopold Palace at speed, and if the carpet hadn’t been so thick and the distance between the huge door and his desk hadn’t been quite so vast we might not have noticed the shiny special shoe and the even shinier metal brace. Well, almost. We were looking...
What did it matter to me who killed Dr. Heckholz? I’d only met him once and I felt quite sure I’d never see Frau Minoux again. She was safe in Vienna, and as soon as she heard that her lawyer was dead, I figured she’d probably stay there for a while, at least until she judged it safe to come and ...
In spite of what I had told him, the details of the case were still quite familiar to me. I knew perfectly well why it was I had been unable to apprehend Anita Schwarz’s murderer. But I started work all the same. I was looking for a missing girl who just might be dead. And I was keeping an eye ou...
Ordinarily, in a place like Jumby Bay, I’d have swum in my private pool, sat in the sun, ordered a cocktail and read a book, probably. But that didn’t sit right with me while I was taking money from the club. Especially as they weren’t having the best season. And things had only been made worse b...
But in the Anhalter Bahnhof, waiting to board the Reich Railways train early that July morning, I felt oddly uncomfortable dressed as a Sipo captain in spite of the fact that almost everyone else was wearing a uniform. It was as if I’d signed a contract in blood with Hitler himself. In the event ...
said Mr. Rapscallion. “Perhaps two pipes.” From the pocket of his coat he took out a strangely curving white pipe made of English clay and lit it with a taper from the fire. “Years ago, when I was younger,” he said, “I had a mind—well, half a mind, anyway—to see something of the world. The mounta...
There was plenty of time. The hotel was less than five miles away and the only thing causing traffic on the road were the geckos. ‘I know the guy from Loukis Rent-a-Car,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive over there in the morning and tell him to come and fetch the car from my place. Zoi will lock up, of cou...
It was a very cold morning and I was a little worried about Terence Shelley who we’d locked up in the maintenance area, the same one where Zarco had been found dead. Even in a policeman’s coat and uniform he would have spent a very uncomfortable Sunday night in the open air, handcuffed to a twent...
He was carrying a Pan American flight bag over one shoulder. I didn’t get out of the car. I switched off the engine, wound down the window, and then Maugham leaned in. It was a beautiful deep summer evening—the kind of evening for talk of love, not blackmail money and an incriminating photograph....
Were they mine? I might have said they were except for two things. The footprints led into the sitting room whereas I was quite certain that on entering the house in response to Sara’s scream I had run straight upstairs. The other thing was much more disturbing—these were large, barefoot, Man Fri...
For a lot of detectives lacking the skills or the patience to do the job properly, it was the only way they could ever secure a conviction. I’d never done it myself but there’s a first time for everything and, in the absence of the evidence that was legally held by the Gestapo in the death of Fra...
After breakfast, Ahrens got the key to the cold storeroom where the remains were kept and we went down to the basement to examine these. I found a large tarpaulin laid out on the stone floor. Ahrens drew back the top part to reveal what looked like a tibia, a fibula, a femur and half a pelvis. I ...