Berlin Noir: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem (Bernie Gunther, 1-3)

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The woman is Noreen Charalambides (she of the matching sable hair and coat), a Jewish American journalist whom Bernie meets through Hedda Adlon. My perusal of Web sites did give me a heads up that I can expect to see another Bernie Gunther installment in a year or so: Field Grey is coming out in the UK in July 2010. A serial sex murderer is killing Aryan teenage girls in Berlin - and what's worse, he's making utter fools of the police. In one big paperback you get the complete Berlin trilogy: March Violets; The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem. One of Bernie’s traveling companions on this trip was the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann.

I honestly can’t think of a single other detective, murder mystery, or suspense thriller series I’ve read – including those I’ve mentioned above – that I would ever consider as funny.Murder, politics and a very nice twist makes March Violets a very good start to a wonderful ride thru this dark part of history. In the bitter winter of 1947, as the Russian Zone closes around the ruined city, Berliners live on fear and dubiously earned PX goods. That piece takes place in 1937, or in between the story lines of March Violets and The Pale Criminal. What’s New for the 20th of August: Some favorite mysteries; jazz, country, RT, and a musical grab bag; a hoedown, a big dragon, Hellboy, and of course ice cream! I could think of lots of things that made you free, but work wasn't one of them: after five minutes in Dachau, death seemed a better bet.

The mysteries are first-rate hard-boiled stuff, with plenty of fistfights and other manly action, as well as twisting plots full of double-crosses and surprises. As you can tell from my description of the titles to date, one of the ongoing features of this series is the way Kerr shifts his attention around Bernie’s colorful biography! It's a world where it's hard to hold on to honor; however, Gunther understands that honor has no boundaries, even when the Reich attempts to set them. So good so far but then towards the end it all goes a bit urgh as Kerr achieves closure wrapping-up the final loose thread through a massive coincidence which frankly beggars belief, and after that the book suddenly finishes with a final chapter that's really more of an epilogue in which we get a recap; it's almost as though there's a chapter or two missing and that's why I marked it down when it could have been four or five stars!But in occupied Vienna no-one is quite what they appear to be and in the super-powers' hunt for former Nazis that have disappeared Bernie Gunther is the bait.

Bernie is still working as a private investigator in Berlin, in shambles from the Allied bombings and divided into four sectors, each governed by a different force (USA, Britain, France and the Soviet Union). But the Berlin of Philip Kerr’s stories is a character in the books – a personality as complex and troubled as his private-investigator protagonist.Just before he died Philip Kerr finished a fourteenth Bernie Gunther novel Metropolis, which will be published next year.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. But he doesn't, and for me, the endless intriguing within the Nazi leadership that underlies much of the more byzantine twists of the trilogy's plots quickly becomes tiresome.Bernhard Gunther, ex-cop, now a private detective mostly finds missing persons and there are lot of them in Nazi's Berlin.