Private investigator Bernie Gunther is commissioned by industrialists Hermann Six to investigate the murder of his daughter and son-in-law around the time of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

"Bernie Gunther had his first brush with evil as a policeman in 1930s Berlin and came to know it intimately as a private eye under the Nazis, when each case drew him deeper into the enormities of the regime. Now the war is over and Gunther's Vienna, trying to clear an old friend of the murder of American officer. Amid decaying imperial splendor he traces concentric circles of depravity that lead him to a former head of the Gestapo, Gripping, frightening,...

Falsely accused of being a war criminal, Bernie Gunther is off to Buenos Aires, courtesy of ODESSA. But Bernie doesn't have the luxury of lying low in his new home; he is pressured by local police into working on one case in which a young girl turns up gruesomely mutilated, and another in which the daughter of a wealthy German banker has gone missing. They seem to be connected.

It's 1954 and Bernie finds himself flown back to Berlin to work for the French or hang for murder. Bernie's job is simple: to meet and greet POWs returning from Germany and snag one Edgard de Boudel, a French war criminal and member of the French SS. But Bernie's past as a German POW in Russia is about to catch up with him -- in a way he could never have foreseen.

Berlin, March, 1943. A month has passed since the stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Though Hitler insists Germany is winning the war, commanders on the ground know better. Morale is low, discipline at risk. Now word has reached Berlin of a Red massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. If true, the message it would send to the troops is clear: Fight on or risk certain death. For once, both the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Goebbels...

"From New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much anticipated return of Bernie Gunther in a series hailed by The Daily Beast as "the best crime novels around today." 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. The war is over....

It is 1956 and Bernie Gunther has a new name (Christoph Ganz), a clean passport, a chip on his shoulder, and a menial low-paying job in Munich. And then an old friend arrives to repay a debt. He encourages Bernie to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company. When Bernie tries to confront Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war, he finds that somebody else has gotten to him...