Bernhard Gunther, a private investigator in Germany in 1938, is hired by a rich widow to discover who has been blackmailing her, and by the Berlin police to track down a serial killer, and runs into bizarre psychotherapy and medicinal practices and Nazi occultism.

"From New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much-anticipated return of Bernie Gunther in a series hailed by Malcolm Forbes as "the best crime novels around today." A beautiful actress, a rising star of the giant German film company UFA, now controlled by the Propaganda Ministry. The very clever, very dangerous Propaganda Minister-close confidant of Hitler, an ambitious schemer and flagrant libertine. And Bernie Gunther, former Berlin...

When Bernie Gunther takes on a blackmail case and gets involved in the affairs of British spies, the former detective risks exposing his own dark past in this thrilling novel hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “one of Kerr’s best.”
 
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, 1956. Having gone into hiding in the French Riviera, Bernie Gunther is working as a concierge at the Grand-Hôtel...

"New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero's origins, exploring Bernie Gunther's first weeks on Berlin's Murder Squad. A portrait of Bernie Gunther in his twenties: He's young, but he's seen four bloody years of trench warfare. And he's not stupid. So when he receives a promotion and a ticket out of Vice squad, he knows he's not really leaving behind the criminal gangs, the perverse sex clubs, and the laundry...

With his cover blown, Bernie Gunther is waiting for the next move in the cat-and-mouse game that, even a decade after Germany’s defeat, continues to shadow his life.

A supremely disturbing thriller set in the ruins of the Third Reich by an internationally acclaimed master of historical suspense.
Bernie Gunther had his first brush with evil as a policeman in 1930s Berlin and came to know it intimately as a private eye under the Nazis, when each case drew him deeper into the enormities of the regime. Now the war is over and Gunther’s in Vienna, trying to clear an old friend of the murder of an American...