When he introduced Bernie Gunther in the original Berlin Noir trilogy, Philip Kerr immediately established himself as a thriller writer on par with Raymond Chandler. His new Bernie Gunther novels have won him comparisons with Alan Furst, John le Carré, and Graham Greene. A Quiet Flame finds Gunther in Argentina, circa 1950, where he—falsely accused of Nazi war crimes—has been offered a new life and a clean passport by the Perón government. But the tough, fast-talking detective doesn't have the luxury of laying low when a serial killer— whose crimes may reach back to Berlin before the war—is mutilating young girls. Taut, gritty, and loaded with evocative historical detail, A Quiet Flame is among Kerr's best work yet.
Philip Kerr
September 1941: Bernie Gunther returns from the horrors of the Eastern Front to find his home city of Berlin changed, and changed for the worse. The blackout, rationing, the RAF, the S-Bahn murderer and Czech terrorists are all conspiring to make life very unpleasant. Now back at his old desk on Homicide in Kripo HQ, Alexanderplatz, Bernie starts to investigate the death of a Dutch railway worker, while starting something — of an entirely different nature — with a local good-time girl.But he is obliged to drop everything when his old boss, Reinhard Heydrich of the SD, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, orders him to Prague to spend a weekend at his country house. It's an invitation Bernie feels he would gladly have been spared, especially when he meets his fellow guests — all of them senior loathsome figures in the SS and SD.The weekend turns sour almost immediately when a body is found, in a room that was locked from the inside. Now the spotlight falls on Bernie to show off his investigative skills and solve this seemingly impossible mystery. If he fails to do so, he knows what is at stake — not only his reputation, but also that of Reinhard Heydrich, a man who does not like to lose face.
Serving a sentence for manslaughter he didn't commit, Dave Delano spent five years in prison calculating a flawless get-rich-quick plan: a simple hijacking on the high seas.Amazon.com ReviewPhillip Kerr, a bestselling author in his native U.K., has been called "Michael Crichton's smarter brother" due to his wide-ranging intelligence and technical knowledge. Dave Delano, the protagonist of this lively thriller, is an American who's educated himself in prison--serving a sentence for a manslaughter he didn't commit. Newly fluent in Russian, he's intrigued by the idea of redistributing wealth, particularly the Mafia's. His plan is to hijack a transatlantic transport ferry/yacht being used to smuggle drug money and to divert the dollars into his very own bank in the former Soviet Union. It all seems flawless until he meets another Grand Duke passenger who's looking to score: Kate Fury, a gorgeous FBI agent who's been tracking cocaine from Colombia to Miami to the European playgrounds of the rich and expecting the biggest collar of her career. What happens when they cross paths is the stuff of a funny, violent, and oddly romantic caper. The plot twists fast enough to satisfy even die-hard Elmore Leonard fans and turns on double dealing, false identities, and misunderstood motives, without letting the humor get in the way of the action.
I swore not to tell this story while Newton was still alive.1696, young Christopher Ellis is sent to the Tower of London, but not as a prisoner. Though Ellis is notoriously hotheaded and was caught fighting an illegal duel, he arrives at the Tower as assistant to the renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton. Newton is Warden of the Royal Mint, which resides within the Tower walls, and he has accepted an appointment from the King of England and Parliament to investigate and prosecute counterfeiters whose false coins threaten to bring down the shaky, war-weakened economy. Ellis may lack Newton's scholarly mind, but he is quick with a pistol and proves himself to be an invaluable sidekick and devoted apprentice to Newton as they zealously pursue these criminals.While Newton and Ellis investigate a counterfeiting ring, they come upon a mysterious coded message on the body of a man killed in the Lion Tower, as well as alchemical symbols that indicate this was more than just a random murder. Despite Newton's formidable intellect, he is unable to decipher the cryptic message or any of the others he and Ellis find as the body count increases within the Tower complex. As they are drawn into a wild pursuit of the counterfeiters that takes them from the madhouse of Bedlam to the squalid confines of Newgate prison and back to the Tower itself, Newton and Ellis discover that the counterfeiting is only a small part of a larger, more dangerous plot, one that reaches to the highest echelons of power and nobility and threatens much more than the collapse of the economy.Dark Matter is the lastest masterwork of suspense from Philip Kerr, the internationally bestselling and brilliantly innovative thriller writer who has dazzled readers with his imaginative, fast-paced novels. Like An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Name of the Rose, and Kerr's own Berlin Noir trilogy, Dark Matter is historical mystery at its finest, an extraordinary, suspense-filled journey through the shadowy streets and back alleys of London with the brilliant Newton and his faithful protégé. The haunted Tower with its bloody history is the perfect backdrop for this richly satisfying tale, one that introduces an engrossing mystery into the volatile mix of politics, science, and religion that characterized life in seventeenth-century London.