Bernhard Gunther mysteries

Private investigator Bernie Gunther is commissioned by industrialists Hermann Six to investigate the murder of his daughter and son-in-law around the time of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

In a historical suspense novel, chain-smoking, hard-drinking Bernie Gunther moves from riot-torn Berlin in 1931 to Adenauer's Germany in 1954--with a stop at a Russian prisoner-of-war camp along the way.

"Berlin, March, 1943. A month has passed since the stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Though Hitler insists Germany is winning the war, commanders on the ground know better. Morale is low, discipline at risk. Now word has reached Berlin of a Red massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. If true, the message it would send to the troops is clear: Fight on or risk certain death. For once, both the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Goebbels...

"From New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much anticipated return of Bernie Gunther in a series hailed by The Daily Beast as "the best crime novels around today." Once I'd been a good detective in Kripo, but that was a while ago, before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent." Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers. The war is over. Bernie...

It is 1956 and Bernie Gunther has a new name (Christoph Ganz), a clean passport, a chip on his shoulder, and a menial low-paying job in Munich. And then an old friend arrives to repay a debt. He encourages Bernie to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company. When Bernie tries to confront Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war, he finds that somebody else has gotten to him...