Authors: Philip Kerr
ISBN-13: 9780399155307, ISBN-10: 0399155309
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Date Published: March 2009
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Philip Kerr is the author of many novels, but perhaps most important are the four featuring Bernie GuntherThe One from the Other and the Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem).
Philip Kerr returns with his best-loved character, Bernie Gunther, in the fifth novel in what is now a series: a tight, twisting, compelling thriller that is firmly rooted in history.
A Quiet Flame opens in 1950. Falsely fingered a war criminal, Bernie Gunther has booked passage to Buenos Aires, lured, like the Nazis whose company he has always despised, by promises of a new life and a clean passport from the Perón government. But Bernie doesn't have the luxury of settling into his new home and lying low. He is soon pressured by the local police into taking on a case in which a girl has turned up dead, gruesomely mutilated, and anotherthe daughter of a wealthy German bankerhas gone missing. Both crimes seem to connect to an unsolved case Bernie worked on back in Berlin in 1932. It's not so far-fetched that the cases might be linked: after all, the scum of the earth has been washing up on Argentine shoresstate-licensed murderers and torturersso why couldn't a serial killer be among them?
But Argentina, just like Germany, holds terrible secrets within its corrupt halls of power. When beautiful Anna Yagubsky seeks Gunther out, desperate for help, to find out what happened to her Jewish aunt and uncle who have disappeared, he is drawn into a horror story that rivals everything he has tried so hard to leave behind half a world away.
In this new postwar world, Bernie Gunther is a man without a name or a country, but still in full possession of his conscience. He is “the right kind of hero for his timeand ours.” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review)
Every time we're afraid we've seen the last of Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr comes throughas he does in A Quiet Flamewith another unnerving adventure for his morally conflicted hero.