The Other Side of Silence

January 25, 2016
Set in 1956 on the French Riviera, Kerr’s assured 11th Bernie Gunther novel (after 2015’s The Lady from Zagreb) opens on a dark note, with Bernie’s confessing to a failed suicide attempt after his wife abandoned him. Bored by his current job as a hotel concierge, Bernie is brought back into action by bestselling writer and former spy Somerset Maugham, who lives in a nearby villa. Maugham, who’s gay at a time when that was still a criminal offense in Britain, needs Bernie’s help in dealing with a blackmailer who’s threatening to publish a compromising photograph. Meanwhile, an attractive American journalist keen on writing Maugham’s biography turns to Bernie for assistance in gaining access to him. The plot takes a surprising turn, but most compelling are the occasional flashbacks in which Kerr’s hero tries to do the right thing while serving as a cop under the Nazi regime. Author tour. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt (U.K.).

Starred review from March 15, 2016
Readers who love hard-boiled heroes fell for Bernie Gunther back when he was a Berlin cop talking tough to Nazi thugs (March Violets, 1989), and we loved him just as much when he was forced to become an SS soldier on the Eastern Front (Field Gray, 2011). And yet, those whose own dark core runs deep may well love the postwar Bernie most of all, the Bernie whose cynicism has slowly morphed into black despair, like whiskey gradually eating its way through a defenseless liver. We pick up Bernie's story on the French Riviera in 1956, where he is working (under a false identity) as a concierge in a luxury hotel, but still finding nothing right with the world ( Cape Ferrat is a pine-planted spur that projects into the sea like the dried-up and near useless sexual organs of some old French roue ). Before long, Bernie finds much more to ruethan the scenery. It starts with a plea to help another Cape Ferrat resident, Somerset Maugham, out of a jam: it turns out that Maugham is being blackmailed over a photograph showing the celebrated novelist in compromising positions with a group of other men, including British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. What follows is a marvelously intricate tale of betrayals and counterbetrayalsthe scam involves Bernie's past as much as it does Maugham'sand in sorting it all out Bernie finds that he's not quite as dried up as he thought he was. But as good as Bernie is, the real star here is Maugham, who emerges as a world-class cynic for all seasons and a great foil for Bernie. One of the best in a sterling series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2015

A New York Times best-selling author and winner of the British Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Award, Kerr returns with his series starring Bernie Gunther, a former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer. Bernie is at the Grand Hotel Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera in 1956 when Somerset Maugham asks him to find a fourth for a game of bridge. Maugham is being blackmailed, for reasons leading Bernie back to the Third Reich.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.