Philip Kerr ‘A German Requiem’

My local library has as usual come up trumps again with the third book in the Bernard Gunther trilogy, I’ve already listened to the first two. Emergency plumbing due to water leaks in my kitchen freed up some listening time and what better than ‘A German Requiem’

These books were published at the end of the 80’s and thus thankfully tell a single story, Kerr’s research into 30’s and 40’s Germany through the Nazi time and the immediate post war Berlin and Vienna seems good. In this third book set then mostly in Vienna in 1947 Bernie Gunther, who has once again become a private detective, is approached by a Russian colonel to help prove that his old acquaintance and unproven SS war criminal is innocent of a crime he has been set up for. The super cool disabused and cynical Gunther, whose wife was ‘fraternising’ with an American soldier to obtain enough food to survive, travels to Vienna and as in the two previous books gets mixed up with very high placed Nazi’s before surviving the story with bodies piling up around him. The book is a success but Kerr tends to repeat themes from book to book and if you read the full trilogy ( it’s worthwhile),  wait a couple of years between each book.