The Pale Criminal (A Bernie Gunther novel) / Philip Kerr

This is the second or third Bernie Gunther novel I have read, this one taking place in Berlin in 1938 when the excesses of the Nazis begin to boil over and their hatred of the Jews culminates in Kristallnacht. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich's Main Security Office (including the Gestapo, Kripo, and Sicherheitsdienst) reenlists Gunther in the Kriminalpolizei to investigate a series of murders of typically Aryan maidens, who are kidnapped and ritually killed in a manner that seems to suggest a sadistic Jewish plot. Gunther's investigations uncover a plot that is anything but what it appears to be upon first inspection.

What makes the Bernie Gunther series work is his skepticism and barely disguised disdain for the Nazi administration, and his attempts to work for justice in a society that increasingly devalues it. The historical context of these novels is what fascinates me—there’s a lengthy discussion about the burning of the Reichstag, for example; a train leaves from the Anhalter Bahnhof, which today survives as a ghostly fragment in the modern city of Berlin; the infighting and backstabbing and corruption within the Nazi regime—there’s so much to keep the reader consulting background information and bringing up old prewar photos on the internet.

The Anhalter Bahnhof as it looks today.

A prewar photo of the Anhalter Bahnhof

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If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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