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Summary
Summary
An instant classic in the Bernie Gunther series, with storytelling that is fresher and more vivid than ever.
Berlin, 1934: The Nazis have secured the 1936 Olympiad for the city but are facing foreign resistance. Hitler and Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, have connived to soft-pedal Nazi anti- Semitism and convince America to participate. Bernie Gunther, now the house detective at an upscale Berlin hotel, is swept into this world of international corruption and dangerous double-dealing, caught between the warring factions of the Nazi apparatus.
Havana, 1954: Batista, aided by the CIA, has just seized power; Castro is in prison; and the American Mafia is quickly gaining a stranglehold on the city's exploding gaming and prostitution industries. Bernie, who has been unceremoniously kicked out of Buenos Aires, has resurfaced in Cuba with a new life, seemingly one of routine and relative peace. But Bernie discovers that he truly cannot outrun the burden of his past: He soon collides with a vicious killer from his Berlin days, who is mysteriously murdered not long afterward-and an old lover, who may be the murderer.
If the Dead Rise Not is everything fans have come to expect from Philip Kerr: twisted intrigue, tight plotting, quick-witted one-liners, a hang-by-your-thumbs ending, and, most significant, a richer, wiser Bernie Gunther.
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Author Notes
Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on February 22, 1956. He received a master's degree in law from the University of Birmingham in 1980. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, March Violets, was published in 1989 and became the first book in the Bernie Gunther series. His other fiction works for adults include A Philosophical Investigation, Esau, A Five-Year Plan, Gridiron, and Hitler's Peace. He won several Shamus Awards and the British Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction.
His non-fiction works include The Penguin Book of Lies and The Penguin Book of Fights, Feuds and Heartfelt Hatreds: An Anthology of Antipathy. He also wrote young adult books under the name P. B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series and One Small Step. He died of cancer on March 23, 2018 at the age of 62.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Both newcomers and established fans will appreciate Kerr's outstanding sixth Bernie Gunther novel (after A Quiet Flame), as it fills in much of the German PI's backstory. By 1934, as the Nazis tighten their grip on power, Gunther has left the Berlin police force for a job as a hotel detective. His routine inquiry into the theft of a Chinese box from a guest, a German-American from New York, becomes more complex after he learns that the identical objet d'art was reported stolen just the previous day by an official from the Asiatic Museum. The case proves to be connected with German efforts to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics, and provides ample opportunities for Gunther, whom Sam Spade would have found a kindred spirit, to make difficult moral choices. Once again the author smoothly integrates a noir crime plot with an authentic historical background. Note that the action precedes the events recounted in the series' debut, March Violets (1989). (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
It's 1934, and Bernie Gunther's chasing bad guys in Hitler's Berlin. It's 1954, and bad guys are chasing Bernie in the Mafia's Havana. Twenty years will mark a man's face. It will also mark his psyche, and Bernie, ex-homicide detective, ex-hotel dick, ex-soldier in two losing wars, ex-secret policeman in Hitler's despised S.A., has a deeply damaged one. Skeptical to the point of cynicism, a bred-in-the-bone survivalist, he's lied, cheated and, on several occasions, murdered to stay alive. And yet there's that inextinguishable Galahad in himobdurate, and often as not painfully inconvenient. In 1934, for instance, when it would have been so easy to join the Nazi party and keep his job, he declined the invitation. And Bernie truly relished being a homicide cop. The fact that he saw the Weimar Republic as seriously flawed and probably not worth the sacrifice didn't matter. Loyalty mattered. Flash forward to 1954. It's not been an easy couple of decades for Bernie, including two miserable years in a Russian prison camp. Now here he is in Havana, confronting dj vu situations and at least two very unsettling people: Noreen Charalambides, a beautiful Jewish woman he'd loved and risked for, and Max Reles, a ferocious gangster he both hated and feared. In Berlin, Noreen had enlisted him in a cause he knew was lost, and that, thanks to Reles, he had almost died for. Suddenly, Berlin is an unfinished story, and Bernie has choices to make. Another sexy, mordantly funny, thinking man's thriller from Kerr (A Quiet Flame, 2009, etc.), who, despite an impressive body of work, continues to fly under the radar. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When we last saw Bernie Gunther, the Weimar Germany police detective and, later, reluctant SS officer in World War II had worn out his welcome in postwar Argentina (A Quiet Flame, 2009). Now it's 1954, and Kerr's cynical Chandlerian crime-solver has landed in Cuba, attempting to stay under the radar of those who consider him a Nazi war criminal. But Kerr is well aware that the heart and soul of his celebrated series remain in 1930s Berlin, where Weimar decadence sang its swan song to the rhythm of Brownshirts marching in lockstep. So, as he did in A Quiet Flame, Kerr combines the postwar story with a flashback to Bernie's Berlin heyday. This time it's 1934, and the Nazis are gearing up for the 1936 Olympics. Bernie falls headlong for American Jewish reporter Noreen Charalambides and agrees to help her promote a U.S. boycott of the Olympics by telling the real story about the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. The plan falls apart, of course, leaving Bernie with a broken heart and Noreen on a boat for the States. Flash-forward to Havana, where Bernie runs into Noreen in a bookstore and quickly finds himself in another mess, this one involving American gangsters, Cuban rebels, and Noreen's frisky daughter. There's more than enough succulent atmosphere here for two novels, one for each setting. Both stories and both locales deserve star billing and seem a bit shortchanged without it. Still, there's so much to enjoy here that it seems churlish to complain. On any continent, in any decade, no one does melancholy better than Bernie Gunther, and melancholy, after all, is the hard-boiled mystery fan's emotion of choice.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
How do domestic abuse and chronic alcoholism drive entire neighborhoods to ruin? How can drug trafficking and ethnic violence transform a vast public housing complex into a war zone? These are the sorts of questions raised by the gutsy Scottish writer Denise Mina in two series of sociologically freighted novels set in Glasgow. Each comes with its own locally born and bred (and nearly broken) female protagonist, one a social worker and the other a reporter, who approach crime by going to the root of it and asking how a civilized society can allow such injustice to flourish. STILL MIDNIGHT (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $24.99) opens a third series in the same vein, challenging us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even the most close-knit family. Terror grips the household of a shopkeeper named Aamir Anwar when two masked gunmen burst into the family's modest home clamoring for "Bob," a name that means nothing to anyone. In their frustration, the bumbling pair make off with the patriarch after accidentally shooting his daughter, leaving the others wondering how to come up with a £2 million ransom. Alex Morrow, a detective sergeant with the Strathclyde police force, is another of Mina's prickly heroines, the kind you love at your own risk. Burdened with personal tragedy and embattled by class and gender politics, Morrow is abrasive, ill-mannered and tough to like. She's also the smartest cop in the shop, the only one sensitive enough to interpret the subtle vagaries of human behavior. It's a huge pleasure to watch her crack the "family myths and fables" that blood relatives instinctively adopt as protection from outsiders - and as a way of preserving themselves from members of their own clan. Mina makes a great deal of the racial prejudices that poison community police work, but her grimly funny plot really turns on the eccentricities of her unpredictable characters. If you don't count his newborn grandchild, Aamir is the only true innocent here, a tidy little man whose mania for cleanliness and order is his way of keeping chaos at bay. The amateur villains of this tragicomic piece are drawn with the same wry compassion and bleak humor, even the clumsy idiot who is so startled by the beauty of Aamir's teenage daughter that he shoots her. However this family pulls together after these bizarre misadventures, the safe and orderly world Aamir built to protect it will never be the same. The voice of the narrator - low, intense and soaked in melancholy - is what hooks us in KNOWN TO EVIL (Riverhead, $25.95), the second mystery by Walter Mosley to feature Leonid McGill, an exboxer and onetime fixer for the mob. "I gave up my dirty tricks with the intention of doing the right thing in my business and my life," McGill tells us in a world-weary tone that's music to our ears. "But that never changed my brawling style." This reformed bad boy currently works out of an Art Deco Manhattan office building as a private eye, but it's hard to make amends to society when most of your clients and contacts have underworld connections. Harder still when the wife you don't love, the lover who left you, and two criminally inclined children are creating constant distractions. McGill's shady past comes back to bite him when he does a favor for a power broker he refers to as "the Big Man" by keeping an eye on a young woman of blameless reputation. When the P.I. arrives on her doorstep, the place is crawling with cops, and before he knows it, McGill is mixed up in a murder. Mosley uses his plot like clothesline, stringing up scenes that barely touch but look great flapping in the wind. His characters are something else, though. Like McGill, they live and breathe genre lingo, even when they're just talking with their fists. Philip Kerr transports us to Nazi Germany in 1934 in IF THE DEAD RISE NOT (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), a solid addition to the great crime novels that make up the Berlin Noir trilogy and, like them, strategically positioned on the margins of World War II. Bernie Gunther, the maverick homicide cop who bolted the force during the political purges of 1933, is installed as a house detective at a fashionable hotel, dealing with petty thefts and keeping an eye out for "joy girls." Yet this dull job turns deadly when Bernie is caught up in the German Olympic Organizing Committee's machinations to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympiad by covering up its systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Leaving the intrigue to the flashy guys in espionage novels, Bernie arms himself with a strong right hook and a tough-guy line of patter to make it out of this one alive. That well-bred voice cursing a blue streak in INVISIBLE BOY (Grand Central, $24.99) can belong only to Madeline Dare, the renegade socialite from Oyster Bay, Long Island, who solves murders and spits venom in Cornelia Read's offbeat mysteries, it's the early 1990s and Madeline is living in Chelsea and working part time taking phone orders for a publisher when her cousin Cate talks her into helping to restore an abandoned family cemetery in Queens. Madeline is so distressed when she discovers a child's skeleton in the underbrush that she attaches herself to the police investigation. Although Read gives her heroine a strong personal motive for delving into this sad case, the soulsearching and hand-wringing get a bit maudlin. We're ever so much happier when Madeline takes a break from her quest to talk trash with her foul-mouthed friends. Denise Mina's latest novel challenges us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even a close-knit family.
Library Journal Review
As in A Quiet Flame, British author Kerr sets the action of his sixth Bernie Gunther series in two distinct epochs-prewar Berlin (1934) and Havana 20 years later. Forced off the Berlin police force because of his allegiance to the old Weimar Republic, Bernie is now the Adlon Hotel's house detective. As the Nazis consolidate power, the survival of the city's Jews grows more precarious. Bernie, one-fourth Jewish himself, gets embroiled in a conflict between corrupt businessmen who aim to profit from the 1936 Olympiad and a beautiful American (and Jewish) journalist, Noreen Charalambides, who hopes to derail U.S. participation. By the time the dust settles, Bernie is locked in a stalemate with American mobster Max Reles. In 1954, Bernie is living in Havana and runs across Noreen, now a successful author living in Hemingway's Finca Vigia, where she consorts with Communists. To Bernie's surprise, Noreen's daughter is palling around with Max Reles, now in cahoots with Meyer Lansky and other mobsters. Soon, Bernie will have one more murder to solve if he hopes to survive and save those dear to him. Verdict As rich in historical atmosphere as any Alan Furst thriller and leavened by the cutting wit of Bernie's cynicism, this outstanding roman noir will delight readers of detective fiction and historical thrillers alike. [See "Prepub Exploded," BookSmack!, 10/1/09.]-Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.