Peachy Reads

The setting for this installment of the Bernie Gunther series takes place during the complicated post-war years, in which former Nazis frequently went to South America, were extradited, and tried for war crimes in Europe.   Bernie is picked up on a boat by a US Navy patrol off the coast of Cuba, and is then transported first to a prison in New York and from there to France and Germany, where the story of his time in Paris and Vichy France is gradually revealed.

There is a sometimes fluid boundary between reality and the fairy world. When a man returns after a long absence to his childhood home for a funeral, he remembers a friend who used to live down the lane.   When he visits, long discarded memories are reawakened and he relives the strange goings-on that occurred when a monster crossed from the netherworld into his own.

During the first World War Halifax, Nova Scotia, served as the gathering point for trans-Atlantic convoys. Merchant and military ships would mix in the harbor, and on one unfortunate day a transport containing highly explosive ordnance caught fire and eventually exploded in an event that nearly obliterated the Canadian town and its citizens.