The Lady from Zagreb
G.P. Putnam's Sons (Verlag)
978-0-399-17650-0 (ISBN)
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A beautiful actress, a rising star of the giant German film company UFA, now controlled by the Propaganda Ministry. The very clever, very dangerous Propaganda Minister-close confidant of Hitler, an ambitious schemer and flagrant libertine. And Bernie Gunther, former Berlin homicide bull, now forced to do favors for Joseph Goebbels at the Propaganda Minister's command.
This time, the favor is personal. And this time, nothing is what it seems.
Set down amid the killing fields of Ustashe-controlled Croatia, Bernie finds himself in a world of mindless brutality where everyone has a hidden agenda. Perfect territory for a true cynic whose instinct is to trust no one.
Philip Kerr is the author of nine widely acclaimed Bernie Gunter novels, most recently The Man Without Breath. Field Gray , the seventh in the series, was a finalist for the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel. Kerr has also been a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best Hardcover Fiction and he won the British Crime Writers Association's Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. Under the name P. B. Kerr, he is the author of the much-loved young adult series Children of the Lamp. He lives in London.
Praise for Philip Kerr
"Kerr is the only bona fide heir to Raymond Chandler." -Jonathan Ames, Salon
"Bernie isn't one of those detectives who gets to solve crimes and put things right. Instead, he just tries to behave decently in a world where the serial killers run the governments and history itself may be the biggest crime of all." -John Powers, NPR's "Fresh Air"
"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." - Booklist
Chapter 1.
I awoke from a long but agitated sleep to a world that was black and white but mostly black, with silver piping. I'd stolen some Luminal from General Heydrich's country house outside Prague to help me sleep. He didn't need it for the simple reason that he was dead and I certainly wouldn't have stolen it from him otherwise. But pills were even harder to get than booze which, like everything else, was in short supply and I needed them because as an officer in the SD I was a part of the horror now, much more than Heydrich. He was dead, buried the month before with full military honors with a clove of garlic in his mouth and a stake through his heart. He was well out of it, his last thoughts of revenge upon his Czech assassins still suspended inside his elongated El Greco head like so much frozen gray mud and there was no more harm he could do anyone. But in my wretched efforts to stay alive at almost any cost I could still hurt and be hurt in my turn, and as long as death's black barrel organ was playing it seemed I would have to dance to the cheerless, doom-filled tune that was turning inexorably on the drum, like some liveried monkey with a terrified rictus on its face and a tin cup in its hand. That didn't make me unusual; just German.
Berlin had a haunted look that summer, as if behind every tree and around each street corner was a screaming skull or some wide-eyed and shape-shifting alp . Sometimes when I woke in my bed at the flat in Fasanenstrasse, soaked with sweat, it was as if I'd had some demon sitting on my chest, crushing the breath out of me and, in my rush to draw a breath and check that I was still alive, I often heard myself cry out and reach to grab at the sour air I had exhaled during the day, which was when I slept. And usually I lit a cigarette with the alacrity of someone who needed the tobacco smoke to breathe a little more comfortably and to help overcome the omnipresent taste of mass murder and human decay that stayed in my mouth like an old and rotten tooth.
The summer sunshine brought no joy. It seemed to exercise a sinister effect, making Berliners irritable with the broiling heat because there was nothing but water to drink, and reminding them always of how much hotter it probably was on the dry steppes of Russia and Ukraine, where our boys were now fighting a battle that already looked like much more than we had bargained for. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows in the tenement streets around Alexanderplatz and played tricks on your eyes, so that the phosphenes on your retinas - the after-effects of the mercilessly bright light - seemed to become the greenish auras of so many dead men. It was in the shadows where I belonged and where I felt comfortable, like an old spider that simply wants to be left alone. Only there wasn't much chance of that. It always paid to be careful what you were good at in Germany. Once I'd been a good detective in Kripo, but that was a while ago, before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent. Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.
On Heydrich's orders I'd been working nights at the police praesidium on Alexanderplatz, which suited me just fine. There was no proper police work to speak of but I had little or no appetite for the company of my Nazi colleagues or their callous conversation. The Murder Commission, what remained of it -which existed to investigate homicides - left me to my own devices, like a forgotten prisoner whose face meant death for anyone unwise enough to catch a glimpse of it. I was none too fond of it myself. Unlike Hamburg and Bremen, there were no night-time air-raids to speak of, which left the city sepulchrally quiet, so very different from the Berlin of the Weimar years when it had been the noisiest and most exciting city on earth. All that neon, all that jazz, and more especially all that freedo
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 27.4.2015 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Bernie Gunther |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 228 mm |
| Gewicht | 520 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror |
| Schlagworte | 2. Weltkrieg / Zweiter Weltkrieg; Krimis/Thriller • Berlin, Geschichte; Krimis/Thriller • Drittes Reich / 3. Reich; Krimis/Thriller • Englisch; Krimis/Thriller • Kriegsverbrechen / Kriegsverbrecher; Krimis/Thriller • Kriegsverbrechen; Krimis/Thriller • Spionage; Krimis/Thriller |
| ISBN-10 | 0-399-17650-0 / 0399176500 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-399-17650-0 / 9780399176500 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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