In una calda Berlino del 1936, alla vigilia delle Olimpiadi, l’investigatore privato Bernhard Gunther, veterano del fronte turco ed ex-poliziotto, è alle prese con un caso di persona scomparsa. Si tratta della figlia di un potente industriale e non ci vorrà molto perché Bernie si trovi coinvolto in una vicenda pericolosissima che tocca le alte sfere del potere nazista e che, proprio per questo, potrebbe costargli la vita… Perfetta ricostruzione dell’ambiente (personaggi storici compresi), maestria dell’intreccio giallo e particolarità dello stile (preciso, diretto e avvincente) sono le qualità che hanno decretato il successo di Violette di marzo – primo romanzo della cosiddetta «Trilogia berlinese» -, del suo memorabile protagonista e del suo autore, considerato uno dei maggiori scrittori inglesi delle nuove generazioni.
Bernie Gunther Serie
Questa serie segue un investigatore privato che naviga attraverso i decenni turbolenti della Germania nazista e dell'Europa del dopoguerra. Con uno sguardo inflessibile sulla realtà, indaga su casi che lo trascinano negli angoli più oscuri della società. La serie offre una tagliente critica dei regimi politici e delle complessità morali dell'epoca, mentre il suo protagonista lotta per sopravvivere e mantenere la propria integrità.
Ordine di lettura consigliato
Il criminale pallido
- 356pagine
- 13 ore di lettura
Bernie Gunther, il rude e disincantato investigatore privato, è alle prese con un difficile caso nella Germania hitleriana. Sulle tracce di un ipotetico serial killer, Gunther si ritrova invischiato in un complotto interno al potere nazista che vede coinvolto lo stesso Himmler. Lo scopo è quello di far ricadere su un membro della comunità ebraica la colpa di una serie di crimini efferati. Schierandosi pericolosamente dalla parte della verità, molto scomoda per il potere, Gunther insegue il colpevole nella calda estate berlinese, in un crescendo di tensione e rivelazioni che culminerà nella terribile persecuzione antiebraica del novembre 1938: la "notte dei cristalli".
Un requiem tedesco
- 413pagine
- 15 ore di lettura
E' il 1947, la Berlino nazista è un cumulo di macerie e il detective Bernie Gunther è costretto a trasferirsi temporaneamente a Vienna per indagare sulla morte di un capitano dell'esercito americano, nella quale pare essere coinvolto un suo vecchio collega della polizia berlinese. In mezzo alle rovine della città agonizzante, Gunther si dovrà muovere tra spie americane e russe, ex nazisti braccati o reclutati dal controspionaggio, uomini capaci di vendere qualsiasi cosa e belle donne pronte a vendere se stesse.
Bernie Gunther, Kerr's beloved protagonist, takes center stage in this fast-paced, twist-filled historical thriller that turns his acclaimed German trilogy into a surprise-laden quartet.
A quiet flame
- 448pagine
- 16 ore di lettura
'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD Posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie's final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police. A case he had failed to solve. Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down?
If the dead rise not
- 464pagine
- 17 ore di lettura
'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD As Berlin prepares for the 1936 Olympic Games, Bernie is caught between violently opposing factions in a story that comes full circle in 1950s' Cuba. Berlin 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just eighteen months but already Germany has seen some frightening changes. As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympics, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organisations - a blatant example of discrimination. Forced to resign as a homicide detective with Berlin's Criminal Police, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. Two bodies are found - one a businessman and the other a Jewish boxer. As Bernie digs to unearth the truth, he discovers a vast labour and construction racket designed to take advantage of the huge sums the Nazis are spending to showcase the new Germany to the world. It is a plot that finds its dramatic and violent conclusion twenty years later in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Field Grey
- 576pagine
- 21 ore di lettura
'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD 'A man doesn't work for his enemies unless he has little choice in the matter.' So says Bernie Gunther. It is 1954 and Bernie is in Cuba. Tiring of his increasingly dangerous work spying on Meyer Lansky, Bernie acquires a boat and a beautiful companion and quits the island. But the US Navy has other ideas, and soon he finds himself in a place with which he is all too familiar - a prison cell. After exhaustive questioning, he is flown back to Berlin and yet another prison cell with a proposition: work for French intelligence or hang for murder. The job is simple: he is to meet and greet POWs returning to Germany and to look out for one in particular, a French war criminal and member of the French SS who has been posing as a German Wehrmacht officer. The French are anxious to catch up with this man and deal with him in their own ruthless way. But Bernie's past as a German POW in Russia is about to catch up with him - in a way he could never have foreseen. Bernie Gunther's seventh outing delivers more of the fast-paced and quick-witted action that we have come to expect from Philip Kerr. Set in Cuba, a Soviet POW camp, Paris and Berlin, and ranging over a period of twenty years from the Thirties to the Fifties, Field Grey is an outstanding thriller by a writer at the top of his game.
'The Prague Fatale' is Bernie Gunther's eighth outing. Set in Prague in 1942, it delivers all the fast-paced and quick-witted action that we have come to expect from Philip Kerr. It is an outstanding thriller by a writer at the top of his game.
Berlin, March 1943. The mood in Germany is bleak after their stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Private Investigator Bernie Gunther is at work in the German War Crimes Bureau – weary, cynical but well aware of the value of truth in a world where that’s now a rarity. When human remains are found deep in the Katyn Forest, Bernie is sent to investigate. Rumour has it that this mass grave is full of Polish officers murdered by the Russians. For Josef Goebbels, proof of Russian involvement is sure to destroy the Western Alliance, giving Germany a chance to reverse its devastating losses. But supposing the truth is far more damaging to the German cause? It’s Bernie Gunther’s job to give Goebbels what he needs. But when there’s nothing left for Gunther to lose, the compulsion to speak the truth becomes ever stronger…
The Lady From Zagreb
- 564pagine
- 20 ore di lettura
'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD Summer 1942. When Bernie Gunther is ordered to speak at an international police conference, an old acquaintance has a favour to ask. Little does Bernie suspect what this simple surveillance task will provoke... One year later, resurfacing from the hell of the Eastern Front, a superior gives him another task that seems straightforward: locating the father of Dalia Dresner, the rising star of German cinema. Bernie accepts the job. Not that he has much choice - the superior is Goebbels himself. But Dresner's father hails from Yugoslavia, a country so riven by sectarian horrors that even Bernie's stomach is turned. Yet even with monsters at home and abroad, one thing alone drives him on from Berlin to Zagreb to Zurich: Bernie Gunther has fallen in love.
The Other Side of Silence
- 400pagine
- 14 ore di lettura
It is 1956 on the French Riviera. A world-weary Bernie Gunther is working as concierge at the Grand Hotel, St Jean Cap Ferrat, living under a false name. The Riviera retains its louche glamour even in these gloomy post-war years - a sunny place for shady people. Bernie plays bridge to stave off boredom and misses his old detective life. Then his past walks through the door in the shape of Harold Hennig, a former captain in the Nazi security service. Bernie never forgets a face, especially when it belongs to a mass murderer who, in 1945, was responsible for the deaths of thousands, among them a woman Bernie loved. Since the war, Hennig has enjoyed a lucrative career as a blackmailer. Hennig's target on the Cote d'Azur is a famous resident with a dark past and plenty to hide - the writer, Somerset Maugham
Prussian Blue
- 550pagine
- 20 ore di lettura
Bernie Gunther is on the run. Ordered by Erich Mielke, head of the East German Stasi, to murder an acquaintance of his by thallium poisoning, he finds his conscience is stronger than his desire not to be murdered in turn. Now he must stay one step ahead of Mielke's retribution. The man Mielke has sent to hunt him is an ex-Kripo colleague, and as Bernie pushes towards Germany he recalls their last case together. In 1939, summoned by Reinhard Heydrich to the Berghof: Hitler's mountain home in Obersalzberg. A low-level German bureaucrat had been murdered, and the Reichstag deputy Martin Bormann, in charge of overseeing renovations to the Berghof, wanted the case solved quickly. If the Fuhrer were ever to find out that his own house had been the scene of a recent murder - the consequences wouldn't bear thinking about. And so begins perhaps the strangest of Bernie Gunther's adventures, for although several countries and seventeen years separate the murder at the Berghof from his current predicament, Bernie will find there is some unfinished business awaiting him in Germany.
Will it be unlucky thirteen for Bernie Gunther? Find out in the latest installment in this internationally bestselling and acclaimed series. LEE CHILD calls Bernie Gunther 'one of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' TOM HANKS says 'Kerr leads us through the facts of history and the vagaries of human nature' ALAN FURST calls Philip Kerr 'one of the greatest master story-tellers in English'
Metropolis
- 496pagine
- 18 ore di lettura
Berlin detective Bernie Gunther bows out at last in the 14th and final instalment of this internationally bestselling and award-winning series featuring 'one of the greatest anti-heroes ever written'
Libri correlati
Die Berlin-Trilogie
Feuer in Berlin / Im Sog der dunklen Mächte / Alte Freunde - neue Feinde
- 1072pagine
- 38 ore di lettura
Berlin Noir – Philip Kerrs phantastische Thrillertrilogie aus der deutschen Vergangenheit In seiner Berlin-Trilogie um den Privatdetektiv Bernhard Gunther gelingt es Philip Kerr, die schmutzig-düstere Atmosphäre des Dritten Reichs und der Berliner Nachkriegszeit in der Form eines spannenden Kriminalromans heraufzubeschwören. Geschickt verwebt er die historischen Ereignisse und Protagonisten mit seinen Kriminalgeschichten – eine atemberaubende Mischung. «Kerr ist die europäische Krimi Entdeckung der letzten Jahre.» RADIO BREMEN
Now published in one paperback volume, these three mysteries are exciting and insightful looks at life inside Nazi Germany -- richer and more readable than most histories of the period. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines. (For a review of Kerr's latest novel, The Grid, see our Thrillers section.)
