Prussian Blue

Starred review from February 20, 2017
Edgar-finalist Kerr’s stunning 12th Bernie Gunther novel (after 2016’s The Other Side of Silence) races along on two parallel tracks. In the first, set in 1956, Bernie, who’s been working as a hotel concierge in Cannes, flees France because he bailed out of performing a hit for Stasi chief Erich Mielke, killing a Stasi agent in the process. The hazardous journey takes him by train, bicycle, and foot toward West Germany. In the main narrative, set in April 1939, SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, Bernie’s boss, orders him to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat. A sniper has fatally shot Karl Flex, a civil engineer in Martin Bormann’s employ, on the deck of Hitler’s villa, the Berghof. Bernie has mere days to solve the crime before Hitler returns to Berchtesgaden to celebrate his 50th birthday. Trying to identify Flex’s killer and bring him to justice proves to be the least of Bernie’s worries. Kerr once again brilliantly uses a whodunit to bring to horrifying life the Nazi regime’s corruption and brutality. Author tour. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt (U.K.).

Starred review from May 1, 2017
This case had it all . . . absurdity, alienation, existential anxiety, and no shortage of likely and unlikely suspects. So says the ever-cynical Bernie Gunther in May of 1939, after being dispatched to Adolf Hitler's Bavarian retreat to catch a killer before the Leader arrives to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Bernie's fans know well that Kerr is a master of parallel narratives, one set in the postwar years and another flashing back to Bernie's experiences before and during WWII. That's the case here, too, and Kerr has never done his time-juggling act with greater skill. The novel begins in 1956 with Bernie accosted by the Stasi, East Germany's security arm, and told that either he kills an unreliable Soviet agent, a loose end from The Other Side of Silence (2016), or be killed himself. The Stasi agent charged with making sure Bernie does the job is an old frenemy from 1939, prompting Bernie, as he attempts to escape his captors, to remember his time in Bavaria. Both stories are compelling, but it's the double- and triple-dealing atop Hitler's mountain that steals the show. Throughout the series, Bernie has managed to stay alive despite pummeling Hitler's henchmen with Chandlerian bons mots, and here it's Martin Bormann ( a burly middleweight going to seed, with a proper double chin and a nose like a parboiled turnip ) who is on the receiving end of Bernie's verbal jousting. As always, Kerr lets Bernie have fun with genre conventions without losing sight of the horror behind the tough talk. At the top of everyone's WWII mystery list.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2016

Hiding out on the French Riviera in 1956, former Berlin homicide detective Bernie Gunther is tracked down by the East German Stasi and pressured to poison a female agent in London. Instead fleeing to Berlin, he recalls solving a murder at Hitler's mountaintop retreat in 1939. A New York Times best-selling series in hardcover since 2013.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2017

In this 12th Bernie Gunther thriller (after The Other Side of Silence), it's 1956, and Bernie is still working as a concierge at the Grand Hotel on the French Riviera. Over an unexpected dinner, Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German secret police, blackmails Bernie into poisoning Anne French, a female agent and Bernie's former lover, with thallium, whose antidote is the pigment Prussian blue. To ensure that Bernie follows through, Mielke sends Friedrich Korsch, a former Gestapo homicide detective, to track Bernie as he bolts for Germany. On his perilous journey, Bernie reflects back to 1939, when he and Korsch collaborated in covering up a shocking murder at the Berghof, Hitler's mountain home in Obersalzberg. Back then, Bernie could have prevented Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, from planning the sweeping destruction of countless others. In 1956, Bernie and Korsch converge explosively over haunting issues still lingering in Germany. VERDICT In this skillfully plotted thriller, Kerr punctures the present with the painful past. Fans of the series won't be disappointed. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]--Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.