I read and enjoyed the first three Bernie Gunther novels a few months ago as included in the Berlin Noir trilogy. This novel was written several years after the Noir trilogy and takes place in 1949 with a few flashbacks of what happened to Bernie during and preceding the war. As the novel begins, Bernie is running a hotel near Dachau left to him when his wife is committed to a mental institution. But Bernie decides that he is meant to be a detective not a hotelier. So he sets up shop in Munich and gets some clients who are looking for missing persons. Then a woman approaches him who wants to find out if her war-criminal husband is dead so that she can remarry and be sanctified by the Catholic Church. Bernie takes the case but must go through an organization helping Nazi comrades to find out what happened to the husband. As a result, Bernie gets a really severe beating by the former Nazi group and actually has one of his little fingers cut off! He then gets treated by a well-meaning doctor and is taken to a place in the mountains where the doctor is working to come up with a vaccine for malaria. But all is not as it seems. Bernie ends up in a nefarious plot where his life is in great danger and he ends up being pursued by a Jewish death squad...

This was really a good noir novel taking place in post-war Germany when the repercussions of the war are still much in evidence. Gunther uses humor and moxie to keep from getting killed and his character reminded me of other hard boiled detectives in fiction such as Mike Hammer and Travis McGee. In addition, the novel provided a lot of historical information about the war and its aftermath. Overall, I would highly recommend this and I'll be reading more in the series.

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