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Barb takes care of the web orders here at Boffins, and is your contact for book club enquiries. She spends all her spare time curled up on the couch reading and for the last several years has reviewed books on the Afternoon Program on ABC radio Perth.
This is just the second of Philip Kerr’s twelve novels featuring Bernie Gunther that I have read, so I’m trying to work out how I can find the time to read more of them, this one was so enjoyable. Perhaps enjoyable isn’t quite the right word, seeing as the world of Bernie Gunther is pretty gruesome at times, but his sly, wisecracking nature in the face of all sorts of adversity is definitely addictive.
This particular adventure has two timeframes, 1939 and 1956. In the latter Bernie is on the run, heading north in France, trying to reach his old homeland of Germany before a ghost from his past hunts him down. It’s that past that weighs heavily on Bernie’s mind however, and this forms the bulk of the story. In 1939 Bernie had been ‘persuaded’ by Hitler’s henchman, Heydrich, to travel to Bavaria and investigate a murder that took place at Hitler’s holiday home just weeks before the leader’s birthday visit. As it turns out, sex, drugs and corruption lie at the heart of the matter, but as Bernie soon discovers, the truth is easier to discern than justice is to deliver.
The thing I’m liking most about these novels is Bernie Gunther’s observations about the French, German and English people in the early and middle part of the twentieth century. Kerr hasn’t made Bernie a saint or a genius, but a real human being full of flaws and weaknesses. He evokes the period and setting really well too, so you can picture France and Germany at the time, and Bernie trying to survive.
