by Philip Kerr
Part of Bernie Gunther, book 12
First published 2017
Bernie Gunther sits across from Ernst Mielke at a French Riviera restaurant in 1956. The East German Stasi deputy pushes a vial of poison across the table. Mielke wants Bernie to travel to London and kill a female agent. Bernie refuses and runs for the German border. As he travels by night and hides during the day, Bernie remembers the summer of 1939. He and his partner Friedrich Korsch were sent to investigate a murder at Hitler's mountain retreat in Obersalzberg. They had one week to solve the case before Hitler returned for his fiftieth birthday celebration. The victim was a minor bureaucrat found dead on the terrace of Hitler's own home. Bernie knew the danger he faced. The mountaintop housed an elite Nazi community, and accusing one of them of murder could be fatal. Now, seventeen years later, those two time periods collide as Bernie's past and present merge in an explosive confrontation.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, crime, thriller
Vibes: dark, fast-paced, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: French Riviera, Germany, London, Obersalzberg
Period: 1939, 1956
528 pages · Hardcover · Marian Wood Books/Putnam
Content warnings: violence