Field Gray

Starred review from February 21, 2011
Bernie Gunther's past catches up with him in Kerr's outstanding seventh novel featuring the tough anti-Nazi Berlin PI who survived the Nazi regime (after If the Dead Rise Not). In 1954, Bernie is living quietly in Cuba, doing a little work for underworld boss Meyer Lansky, when he runs afoul of the U.S. Navy and lands in prison in Guantánamo. Later, at an army prison in New York City, FBI agents ask him about his service in WWII, in particular as a member of an SS police battalion on the Eastern Front. Another transfer sends him to Germany's Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was imprisoned in 1923. Officials from various governments question and torture him, but grimly amusing Bernie, who's smarter than any of his interrogators, successfully strings each one of them along. Vivid flashbacks chronicle Bernie's harrowing war experiences. Series aficionados and new readers alike will take comfort knowing that Kerr is hard at work on the next installment. Author tour.

February 15, 2011

When fans meet Bernie Gunther in this latest saga in the adventurous life of the hard-bitten, sardonic policeman, Kerr's (If the Dead Rise Not, 2010, etc.) stalwart Berliner detective is in pre-Castro Cuba.

But Cuba is no refuge. To prevent being forced to work for Batista, he tries to sail to the Dominican Republic, only to be caught by a U.S. Navy patrol boat. It doesn't help that his passenger is a rebel partisan wanted for murder. Gunther's identity discovered, he is sent first to a military prison in New York City and then to the infamous Landsberg prison where the Weimar Republic held Hitler and where the Allies interrogated, tried and sometimes hanged Nazi war criminals. It does no good for Gunther's future that he had served in a SS military police unit on the bloody Eastern Front and had more than a passing acquaintance with devils like Reinhard Heydrich. Kerr propels the story, framed around historical facts and characters, through several flashbacks. The author's ironic perceptions find an SS colonel quoting Goethe as he presides over the massacre of a town full of Jewish civilians and Gunther wryly observing the Franzis (French), the Amis (Americans) and human nature in general: "Sometime morality is just a corollary of laziness." The flashbacks are easily followed, from pre-war Berlin to the murderous hell of the 1941 Eastern Front to postwar slave-labor camps behind the Iron Curtain. Those dealing with Gunther's search for a German communist in 1940 France are truly revealing, especially the descriptions of historical places like the concentration camps in Vichy France. While some might quibble over occasional long sequences of dialogue that would be better served with tags, Kerr writes Gunther as he should be—world-weary, sardonic and as independent as an introspective man might be as he ricochets between murderous criminals, hell-bent Nazis or revenge-minded communists. The double-double cross denouement suggests Gunther will live to fight another day.

An accomplished thriller.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 15, 2010

In this latest Bernie Gunther thriller, which opens in 1931 Berlin and ranges up to postwar Germany, Bernie's a disheartened cynic who nevertheless tries to stick to his moral code. London- and Cornwall-based Kerr will be touring here for the first time in years, a sign of support for this series.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2011
Kerrs seventh Bernie Gunther thriller, starring the cop turned PI in 1930s Germany who landed in Argentina and then Cuba after the war, finally answers in full the question that has been hovering around the edges of the series all along: What did you do during the war, Bernie? As he did in If the Dead Rise Not (2010), Kerr juggles the postwar present and the prewar and war years, telling multiple stories that feed upon one another. This time, we pick up Bernie in Cuba in 1954, but soon enough he has been arrested by American intelligence officers intent on prosecuting him as a war criminal. Bernie is no such thing, of course, but that will take some proving, as he was forced into the SS in 1940 and sent to the Eastern Front, where he endured the worst of that hellish nightmare, including incarceration in a Soviet prison camp. Bernie tells his story to the American investigators, who are most interested in Bernies association with a German Communist now in charge of East Germanys security police. Kerr moves nimbly from prewar Germany to the Eastern Front to Cold War Berlin, all the while showing us what a single individual, who devoutly wishes plagues on German, Russian, and American houses, will do to survive. As deeply cynical and profoundly antiwar and antigovernment as recent le Carr', Kerrs latest shows in the most detailed of terms what it means to be a victim of history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 15, 2011

If there's a PI with a jaundiced eye, it's Bernie Gunther. During his 11 years as a homicide detective in Berlin, he witnessed every kind of perversion. When the Nazis grab power, he leaves the force, but Hitler's man Reinhard Heydrich soon sinks his claws into him. (Even a Nazi needs an honest cop once in a while.) Bernie becomes Heydrich's tame dog. In 1940, he's shipped to the eastern front dressed in SS field gray. Fast-forward to 1954. Bernie is in Cuba, working for Meyer Lansky and the mob. Things heat up, and he's caught while fleeing the country. The CIA takes custody of him; they need his help to capture an elusive East German security police officer. But to Bernie, the Americans are no different from the Nazis--"the worst kind of fascists. The kind that think they're liberals." They force Bernie to talk through his checkered past, taking us back to 1930s-40s Berlin, Paris, and the Soviet Union. VERDICT As always in a Bernie Gunther title (If the Dead Rise Not), the plotting is twisty, the writing crisp, the atmosphere indisputably noir. Fans of hard-boiled PI novels and all readers interested in the dirty history of Nazi Germany will love this book. They don't come any better. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/10.]--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.