An NPR Book of the YearA Crime Reads Best Crime Book of 2018A vicious murder puts Bernie Gunther on the trail of World War 2 criminals in Greece in this riveting historical thriller in Philip Kerr’s New York Times bestselling series.Munich, 1956. Bernie Gunther has a new name, a chip on his shoulder, and a dead-end career when an old friend arrives to repay a debt and encourages “Christoph Ganz” … career when an old friend arrives to repay a debt and encourages “Christoph Ganz” to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company with a client in Athens, Greece.
Under the cover of his new identity, Bernie begins to investigate a claim by Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war. Witzel’s claimed losses are large , and, even worse, they may be the stolen spoils of Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz. But when Bernie tries to confront Witzel, he finds that someone else has gotten to him first, leaving a corpse in his place.
Enter Lieutenant Leventis, who recognizes in this case the highly grotesque style of a killer he investigated during the height of the war. Back then, a young Leventis suspected an S.S. officer whose connection to the German government made him untouchable. He’s kept that man’s name in his memory all these years, waiting for his second chance at justice…
Working together, Leventis and Bernie hope to put their cases–new and old–to bed. But there’s a much more sinister truth to acknowledge: A killer has returned to Athens…one who may have never left.
more
Philip Kerr died in 2018, meaning there will be no more entries in the Bernie Gunther series, which is a pity. This started out as a trilogy of private eye novels set in 1930’s Berlin, a brilliant concept if there ever was one. Then Kerr realized he could ride the character through the Second World War and beyond, using Bernie as a lens to view the whole ghastly history of the middle third of the twentieth century. Bernie is a survivor, a veteran of the trenches in the First World War who became a cop in Berlin in the twenties, hated the Nazis but was drafted into the Nazi security apparatus during the war, and winds up scraping by with odd jobs in diverse locales in the fifties, a jaded, cynical witness to the century’s worst crimes. It is a great device, and Kerr used it to cast light on the historical episodes that interested him, from the Katyn killings to the flight of Nazi war criminals to Argentina.
The publication order does not match the chronological order of Bernie’s life; this is the penultimate book in publication order, but the final entry in Bernie’s story, with a melancholic note of finality. To read the series in chronological order, consult http://www.howtoread.me/bernie-gunthe…
So: a great series, but in my opinion this is not one of the stronger entries. Perhaps because Kerr, who died of cancer, was writing under pressure, there is a bit of the data dump about this book. You sense that Kerr had amassed a lot of interesting research and didn’t have the time or inclination to edit it down. The book runs to 500 pages, and a lot of it is a shade on the didactic side.
In 1957 Bernie is working as a morgue attendant in Munich. By a somewhat contrived sequence of events, he is offered a job as an insurance adjuster for Munich Re, the long-established (factual, and still important) insurance company. He is sent to Athens to investigate a fishy claim, on a ship that sank in Greek waters while hired out to an underwater filmmaker, a German. There Bernie finds himself embroiled in intrigue involving not just insurance fraud, but turbulent postwar Greek politics, the massacre and pillage of the Greek Jewish community and the inevitable Nazi war criminal on the loose, in this case the odious Alois Brunner (a real-life figure who worked for Nasser in Egypt and was sheltered by Assad in Syria while living to a ripe old age, unrepentant).
As a thriller it’s just OK; Kerr’s heap of historical data tends to overwhelm the pacing and drama. The dialogue has a tendency to lapse into lecture mode, and we could do with more wisecracks and less mournful introspection from Bernie. There’s an awful lot of explaining, which tends to slow down a suspense novel.
If you’re a fan of the series, by all means read it. If you’re new to Bernie Gunther, don’t start here. Read them in chronological order and see if Bernie’s bitter, tarnished nobility appeals to you.
This was an elegiac read for me as I put it on my to-read shelf while the author was very much alive and it took me a while to get my soul up to read this given the author’s premature passing. I believe I have read all the Bernie Gunther novels, including this one, the thirteenth. Bernie has worn a little thin — as even he would acknowledge in a mismatched romance with a Greek woman decades his junior. However, there is no fading of the fascinating history of WWII and its later impact. 20th Century Greek history is not something I know a lot about and so I was fascinated with the setting and the politics of this novel. And the war-torn gumshoe Gunther still has a little shoe leather left. Kerr is a master of plot, and a wonderful wielder of a gimlet-eye toward historical circumstance.
I enjoyed this latest book in the 13 book series by Philip Kerr featuring the detective Bernie Gunther. His movement into insurance adjusting was very realisticly rendered, based on my experience representing insurance carriers, and the overarching plot through all of the other books took a forward post-war trajectory1
Last of Philip Kerr’s great Bernie Gunther Series
Any fan of Bernie Gunther will definitely like this one also
OMG, another fantastic Bernie…and tragically the last as Kerr recently passed away. Such a great loss.
I’ve read most or all of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels and thought this was one of his best.
Love, love, love the Bernie Gunther series-some of the best historical fiction I’ve ever read. Sadly, Philip Kerr passed away recently, truly a great loss….
Not up to Mr. Kerr’s usual standards.