by Philip Kerr
Part of Bernie Gunther, book 7
First published 2011
Bernie Gunther sits in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, his body worn thin by captivity. The cynical detective reflects on thirty years that carried him from the riot-filled streets of 1931 Berlin through the killing fields of war to Adenauer's Germany in 1954. He drinks too much, smokes constantly, and trusts no one in a world where allies betray each other daily. The camp has stripped away his bad habits along with his weight, but not his dark sense of humor or his stubborn moral code. Around him swirls a Europe built on expediency, where survival demands compromise and honor seems like a luxury. Bernie knows he has done things that shame him, made choices that haunt him. Yet when everything else falls away, when there is nothing left to lose, something in him still fights for what remains of his humanity. In this landscape where evil and cynicism mark the boundaries of human behavior, Bernie Gunther endures.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, war, mystery, crime, detective
Vibes: dark, emotional, suspenseful
Tropes: antihero, moral-ambiguity, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Berlin, Germany, Russia
Period: 1931, 1954
448 pages · Hardcover · Marian Wood Books/Putnam
Content warnings: violence, war