Field Gray (Bernie Gunther Series #7)

by Philip Kerr

Overview

This The New York Times bestseller will make the Bernie Gunther series the new gold standard in thrillers.

Bernie Gunther is one of the great protagonists in thriller literature. During his eleven years working homicide in Berlin's Kripo, Bernie learned a thing or two about evil. Then he set himself up as a private detective-until 1940 when Heydrich dragooned him into the SS's field gray uniform and the bloodbath that was the Eastern Front. Spanning twenty-five tumultuous years, Field Gray strides across the killing fields of Europe, landing Bernie in a divided Germany at the height of the Cold War. Bernie's latest outing will mesmerize both readers of the Berlin Noir trilogy and anyone who loves historical thrillers, catapulting this cult favorite to breakout stardom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143120728
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/28/2012
Series:	Bernie Gunther Series , #7
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	60,591
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Philip Kerr is the author of twenty-two previous novels. He lives in London and Cornwall, England.

Editorial Reviews

…the darkest and most disturbing of Philip Kerr's novels featuring Bernie Gunther, the former German police officer and wiseguy private eye…
—The New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

The great strength of the novel is Kerr's overpowering portrait of the war's horrors…Sometimes I tire of novels about the Nazis. For lazy writers, Hitler and his minions are an easy symbol of evil, one they find more useful than jihadist terrorists, drug lords and serial killers. But Kerr resurrects the past to remind us that the fascist mentality endures, all over the world, even though swastikas and jackboots are no longer its outward trappings.
—The Washington Post

Patrick Anderson

Bernie Gunther's past catches up with him in Kerr's outstanding seventh novel featuring the tough anti-Nazi Berlin PI who survived the Nazi regime (after If the Dead Rise Not). In 1954, Bernie is living quietly in Cuba, doing a little work for underworld boss Meyer Lansky, when he runs afoul of the U.S. Navy and lands in prison in Guantánamo. Later, at an army prison in New York City, FBI agents ask him about his service in WWII, in particular as a member of an SS police battalion on the Eastern Front. Another transfer sends him to Germany's Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was imprisoned in 1923. Officials from various governments question and torture him, but grimly amusing Bernie, who's smarter than any of his interrogators, successfully strings each one of them along. Vivid flashbacks chronicle Bernie's harrowing war experiences. Series aficionados and new readers alike will take comfort knowing that Kerr is hard at work on the next installment. Author tour. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

If there's a PI with a jaundiced eye, it's Bernie Gunther. During his 11 years as a homicide detective in Berlin, he witnessed every kind of perversion. When the Nazis grab power, he leaves the force, but Hitler's man Reinhard Heydrich soon sinks his claws into him. (Even a Nazi needs an honest cop once in a while.) Bernie becomes Heydrich's tame dog. In 1940, he's shipped to the eastern front dressed in SS field gray. Fast-forward to 1954. Bernie is in Cuba, working for Meyer Lansky and the mob. Things heat up, and he's caught while fleeing the country. The CIA takes custody of him; they need his help to capture an elusive East German security police officer. But to Bernie, the Americans are no different from the Nazis—"the worst kind of fascists. The kind that think they're liberals." They force Bernie to talk through his checkered past, taking us back to 1930s–40s Berlin, Paris, and the Soviet Union. VERDICT As always in a Bernie Gunther title (If the Dead Rise Not), the plotting is twisty, the writing crisp, the atmosphere indisputably noir. Fans of hard-boiled PI novels and all readers interested in the dirty history of Nazi Germany will love this book. They don't come any better. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/10.]—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Library Journal

When fans meet Bernie Gunther in this latest saga in the adventurous life of the hard-bitten, sardonic policeman, Kerr's (If the Dead Rise Not, 2010, etc.) stalwart Berliner detective is in pre-Castro Cuba.

But Cuba is no refuge. To prevent being forced to work for Batista, he tries to sail to the Dominican Republic, only to be caught by a U.S. Navy patrol boat. It doesn't help that his passenger is a rebel partisan wanted for murder. Gunther's identity discovered, he is sent first to a military prison in New York City and then to the infamous Landsberg prison where the Weimar Republic held Hitler and where the Allies interrogated, tried and sometimes hanged Nazi war criminals. It does no good for Gunther's future that he had served in a SS military police unit on the bloody Eastern Front and had more than a passing acquaintance with devils like Reinhard Heydrich. Kerr propels the story, framed around historical facts and characters, through several flashbacks. The author's ironic perceptions find an SS colonel quoting Goethe as he presides over the massacre of a town full of Jewish civilians and Gunther wryly observing the Franzis (French), the Amis (Americans) and human nature in general: "Sometime morality is just a corollary of laziness." The flashbacks are easily followed, from pre-war Berlin to the murderous hell of the 1941 Eastern Front to postwar slave-labor camps behind the Iron Curtain. Those dealing with Gunther's search for a German communist in 1940 France are truly revealing, especially the descriptions of historical places like the concentration camps in Vichy France. While some might quibble over occasional long sequences of dialogue that would be better served with tags, Kerr writes Gunther as he should be—world-weary, sardonic and as independent as an introspective man might be as he ricochets between murderous criminals, hell-bent Nazis or revenge-minded communists. The double-double cross denouement suggests Gunther will live to fight another day.

An accomplished thriller.

Kirkus Reviews