I’ve briefly mentioned already that these novels are written in the first person, entirely from Bernie’s point of view. A group of watercolor landscapes went on sale at a German auction house, supposedly the work of a young and impoverished Adolf Hitler while he was struggling as an artist in Vienna. There are people feeling like that now, but since society doesn't accept it, they either hide it or they are being judged. Since the late eighties, Philip Kerr had been redefining crime fiction with his justly-lauded Bernie Gunther sequence.

But then he went freelance, and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi sub-culture. By 1949 Bernie has shifted his quarters from Berlin to Munich, and after a terribly unsuccessful stint running a small hotel near Dachau, has resumed his private investigation business. The idea of a 'gumshoe' in (and before and after) the Nazi era seemed a bit odd, but the more I read, the more I adapted to the style and the idea and by the end of the 3rd book, I was in. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Gunther is forced to accept a temporary post in Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich's state Security Service, with a team of men underneath him tasked purely with hunting the killer.

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.

When an enigmatic Russian colonel asks Bernie Gunther to go to Vienna, where his ex-Kripo colleague Emil Becker faces a murder charge, Bernie doesn't hesitate for long.They tickled me to the extent that I quickly stopped caring whether these books were intended as homage or imitation and just started inserting mental rimshots after each went past. Thanks to the built-in philosophy, the book had style, even if the plot (which looks forward to Showtime's TV show Dexter) ultimately fell flat. It is 1938 and Bernie Gunther is back on the mean streets of Berlin with his new partner, Bruno Stahlecker, another ex-police officer. Communism is the new enemy, and with the Nuremberg trials over, some strange alliances are being forged against the Red Menace - alignments that make many wartime atrocities look lily-white by comparison.