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.).

Narrator John Lee and author Philip Kerr's German cop, Bernie Gunther, have been together for a while now, but familiarity hasn't dimmed their affinity for each other. In Lee's well-pitched narration of the eleventh book in the series, Gunther is as wry, jaded, and curiously hopeful as ever. We find him in 1956, lying low as a hotel clerk on the Riviera. Recruited to play bridge with Somerset Maugham, he finds himself helping the author outwit a blackmailer whom Gunther himself knows from the bad old days in Nazi Germany. Lee's telling interpretations of oily ex-Nazis, local rich folk, the elderly Maugham and his un-closeted gay set, and Gunther's love interests help color Kerr's undecorated writing and add to the book's undisputed pleasures. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine