About Time I Read It: Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr

maphead

Dec 21

Four years ago I read Philip Kerr's 2012 historical detective novel Prague Fatale and after doing so vowed to read more novels from Kerr's acclaimed Bernie Gunther series. Only recently did I make good on this promise, borrowing through my small town public library a copy of his 2018 Greeks Bearing Gifts. This complex tale involving greed, murder and the horrors of the Holocaust made for enjoyable reading, leaving me wanting to explore other novels from this promising series.

It's 1956 and Bernie Gunther is stuck in a dead-end job (literally, since he's working in a morgue), a far cry from his glory days as Berlin's premier police detective. Previously, during World War II despite his deep loathing of the Nazis he nevertheless found himself dragooned into an SS police battalion and dispatched to the Eastern Front. Despite his relatively benign wartime record he's fearful of being unfairly prosecuted as a Nazi war criminal. Forced to live under a fake identity he's unable to return to police work since he could be potentially identified and outed by one of his former colleagues. Worse still, his frustration abounds knowing so many of his countrymen who committed horrible wartime atrocities now safely occupy positions of power throughout the new West Germany, including several close to the nation's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

But after his investigative talents are discovered by a deep-pocked insurance mogul Gunther's offered a promising position and before long he's on a plane to Greece, tasked with investigating the sinking of a small German-owned ship. But after the client is found murdered forcing Greek authorities cast a suspicious eye towards Gunther what first looked like a simple open and shut case snowballs into a complex whodunnit featuring an array of players all intimately linked to the deportation and murder of Salonica's Jewish community in the Holocaust.

Greeks Bearing Gifts is a lot of fun, especially for fans of the hard-boiled detective genre. I look forward to reading more from this series in the coming year.