The last time we encountered Bernie Gunther, it was shortly before WW2; he was reinstated “temporarily” as a police officer to investigate the disappearance & murders of teenaged girls. Since then, he was drafted, fought in the war and spent a lot of time in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. Now he is back, trying to pull his life together. He is married, and is still trying to eke out a living as a gumshoe.
He is called to look into the murder of a prominent German businessman, which sees him travel to Vienna. The investigation leads him into confrontation with several factions, including the Red Army, the Allied occupiers, former Nazi war criminals in hiding and the newly formed East German state. As always, there is a much deeper conspiracy than what Gunther initially set out to investigate, with several twists and surprises thrown in.
The book paints a grim picture of a country recovering from being on the losing side of a brutal war, where the common man has to scrimp and scrounge to survive, where the line between right and wrong is very blurred. But the key plot gets so convoluted, that I could not keep pace. I lost track of the key plot and the characters. What makes it more complex is the Machiavellian nature of the key characters, making it impossible to know which side they are on, or indeed, any side but their own. By the end of the book, I had no idea of the central plot, but the picture Kerr paints of Post-war Europe is undeniably magnificent.