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Philip Kerr delivers a novel with the noir sensibility of Raymond Chandler, the realpolitik of vintage John le Carr#65533;, and the dark moral vision of Graham Greene.

"Bernie Gunther is the most antiheroic of antiheroes in this gripping, offbeat thriller. It's the story of his struggle to preserve what's left of his humanity, and his life, in a world where the moral bandwidth is narrow, satanic evil at one end, cynical expediency at the other."
-Philip Caputo, author of A Rumor of War

"A thriller that will challenge preconceptions and stimulate the little grey cells."
- The Times (London), selecting Field Gray as a Thriller of the Year

"Part of the allure of these novels is that Bernie is such an interesting creation, a Chandleresque knight errant caught in insane historical surroundings. Bernie walks down streets so mean that nobody can stay alive and remain truly clean."
-John Powers, Fresh Air (NPR)

Bernie on Bernie: I didn't like Bernhard Gunther very much. He was cynical and world-weary and hardly had a good word to say about anyone, least of all himself. He'd had a pretty tough war . . . and done quite a few things of which he wasn't proud. . . . It had been no picnic for him since then either; it didn't seem to matter where he spread life's tartan rug, there was always a turd on the grass.

Striding across Europe through the killing fields of three decades-from riot-torn Berlin in 1931 to Adenauer's Germany in 1954, awash in duplicitous "allies" busily undermining one another- Field Gray reveals a world based on expediency, where the ends justify the means and no one can be trusted. It brings us a hero who is sardonic, tough- talking, and cynical, but who does have a rough sense of humor and a rougher sense of right and wrong. He's Bernie Gunther. He drinks too much and smokes excessively and is somewhat overweight (but a Russian prisoner-of-war camp will take care of those bad habits). He's Bernie Gunther-a brave man, because when there is nothing left to lose, honor rules.

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Library Journal Review

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 (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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 Guantanamo. 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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Kerr's 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 Bernie's association with a German Communist now in charge of East Germany's 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 Carré, Kerr's latest shows in the most detailed of terms what it means to be a victim of history.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on February 22, 1956. He received a master's degree in law from the University of Birmingham in 1980. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, March Violets, was published in 1989 and became the first book in the Bernie Gunther series. His other fiction works for adults include A Philosophical Investigation, Esau, A Five-Year Plan, Gridiron, and Hitler's Peace. He won several Shamus Awards and the British Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction.

His non-fiction works include The Penguin Book of Lies and The Penguin Book of Fights, Feuds and Heartfelt Hatreds: An Anthology of Antipathy. He also wrote young adult books under the name P. B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series and One Small Step. He died of cancer on March 23, 2018 at the age of 62.

(Bowker Author Biography)