Berlin Noir

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.)