A Man Without Breath

Starred review from February 11, 2013
Set in the spring of 1943, Kerr’s captivating ninth Bernie Gunther novel (after 2011’s Prague Fatale) takes Gunther—now attached to the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau—from Berlin to Smolensk, to investigate mass graves of Polish officers discovered in the nearby Katyn forest. Josef Goebbels, seeking a propaganda coup after Germany’s Stalingrad defeat, is keen to pin the atrocity on the Soviets. The tormented honest cop also gets on the trail of a killer targeting German soldiers, even as he finds himself in an anomalous moral position (“a situation in which you can have an army corporal hanged for the rape and murder of a Russian peasant girl in one village that’s only a few miles from another village where an SS special action group has just murdered twenty-five thousand men, women and children”). Kerr makes everything look easy, from blending history with a clever and intricate whodunit plot to powerful descriptions of cruelty. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt (U.K.).

March 1, 2013
Kerr (Field Gray, 2011, etc.) offers his eighth Bernie Gunther mystery. It is 1943. Stalingrad has gutted Hitler's Wehrmacht, but the Nazi plague infecting the East rages on. Gunther, formerly commissar at Berlin Police Praesidium, has been drafted into the German war effort as an investigator in the army's War Crimes Bureau. Jaded and cynical, sardonic and impudent, Gunther is no Nazi sympathizer. He understands he's to uncover only war crimes that might be used as German propaganda. There come reports of possible mass graves at Smolensk, and Gunther is sent to investigate. Propaganda minister Goebbels wants confirmation that mass graves are in Smolensk's Katyn Wood, and he wants responsibility laid on the Russian NKVD. Kerr's sketch of Goebbels dazzles. The author pulls the reader down into the dark underground of Der Fuhrer's rabbit hole of totalitarian horror. While supervising the exhumations, Gunther stumbles upon a plan by the Wehrmacht's aristocratic Prussian Junker leadership to assassinate Hitler. Kerr examines the brutality of the Eastern Front war, the German attempt to wipe out the Jewish population, the Russian partisans' terror tactics focused on the occupiers, the Gestapo's retribution against innocents, and the racial and ethnic conflicts resolved by barbarity. Kerr masterfully explores morality's shadowy gray edge.

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November 15, 2012

In this latest (and most pointed) in Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, set during World War II and featuring a German police detective, Bernie is asked to investigate a mass grave site in the Katyn Forest that contains the bodies of Polish army officers. What makes this book really fascinating (and authentic): while researching, Kerr found a map of Smolensk made by SS cartographers in 1942, with all the streets renamed by Germany after it conquered Poland. And important: rights to the first three Bernie Gunther novels, called the "Berlin Noir" trilogy, have been purchased by Tom Hanks's production company in tandem with HBO.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2013
As we learn more about what Bernie Gunther, the Berlin cop turned PI turned reluctant SS member, really did in the warparticularly his experiences on the bloody, atrocity-riddled eastern fronta common theme emerges: staying alive. Bernie despises Nazis, of course, but he's no friend of the Communists, either, and, for that matter, the British just happen to be bombing the hell out of his hometown. It's 1943after Stalingradand every ordinary German, in the service or not, knows the war is going badly. Bernie is just hoping to survive the end game when he is sent to Smolensk, where evidence has surfaced of the massacre of Polish officers by the Red Army in the Katyn Forest. The German propaganda machine, led by Joseph Goebbels, could use a good story, and this has the makings of one. Bernie's job is to monitor the exhumation of the mass graves, try to find witnesses to the atrocity, and feed reports to Goebbels. But there's a problem: there's a murderer in Smolensk who seems to want to kill everyone with something to say. And then there's the matter of a new plot to assassinate Hitler fomenting among the Wehrmacht's old guard. Bernie, naturally, is caught in the middle of it all, with no horse in the race except solving the case in front of him and saving his own skin. Once again, Kerr vividly captures the excruciating moral ambiguity of Bernie's position, driving home the point that cynicism is the only sane reaction for a man on the wrong side of history. Superb as always.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)