Greeks Bearing Gifts
A Bernie Gunther Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
An NPR Book of the Year
A Crime Reads Best Crime Book of 2018
A vicious murder puts Bernie Gunther on the trail of World War 2 criminals in Greece in this riveting historical thriller in Philip Kerr's New York Times bestselling series.
Munich, 1956....
A Crime Reads Best Crime Book of 2018
A vicious murder puts Bernie Gunther on the trail of World War 2 criminals in Greece in this riveting historical thriller in Philip Kerr's New York Times bestselling series.
Munich, 1956....
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An NPR Book of the YearA Crime Reads Best Crime Book of 2018
A vicious murder puts Bernie Gunther on the trail of World War 2 criminals in Greece in this riveting historical thriller in Philip Kerr's New York Times bestselling series.
Munich, 1956. Bernie Gunther has a new name, a chip on his shoulder, and a dead-end career when an old friend arrives to repay a debt and encourages "Christoph Ganz" to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company with a client in Athens, Greece.
Under the cover of his new identity, Bernie begins to investigate a claim by Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war. Witzel's claimed losses are large , and, even worse, they may be the stolen spoils of Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz. But when Bernie tries to confront Witzel, he finds that someone else has gotten to him first, leaving a corpse in his place.
Enter Lieutenant Leventis, who recognizes in this case the highly grotesque style of a killer he investigated during the height of the war. Back then, a young Leventis suspected an S.S. officer whose connection to the German government made him untouchable. He's kept that man's name in his memory all these years, waiting for his second chance at justice...
Working together, Leventis and Bernie hope to put their cases--new and old--to bed. But there's a much more sinister truth to acknowledge: A killer has returned to Athens...one who may have never left.
Lese-Probe zu „Greeks Bearing Gifts “
oneThere was a murderous wind raging through the streets of Munich when I went to work that night. It was one of those cold, dry Bavarian winds that blow up from the Alps with an edge like a new razor blade and make you wish you lived somewhere warmer, or owned a better overcoat, or at least had a job that didn't require you to hit the clock at six p.m. I'd pulled enough late shifts when I'd been a cop with the Murder Commission in Berlin so I should have been used to bluish fingers and cold feet, not to mention lack of sleep and the crappy pay. On such nights a busy city hospital is no place for a man to find himself doomed to work as a porter right through until dawn. He should be sitting by the fire in a cozy beer hall with a foaming mug of white beer in front of him, while his woman waits at home, a picture of connubial fidelity, weaving a shroud and plotting to sweeten his coffee with something a little more lethal than an extra spoonful of sugar.
Of course, when I say I was a night porter, it would have been more accurate to say that I was a mortuary attendant, but being a night porter sounds better when you're having a polite conversation. "Mortuary attendant" makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable. The living ones, mostly. But when you've seen as many corpses as I have you tend not to bat an eyelid about being around death so much. You can handle any amount of it after four years in the Flanders slaughterhouse. Besides, it was a job and with jobs as scarce as they are these days you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, even the spavined nag that had been bought for me, sight unseen, outside the doors of the local glue factory by the old comrades in Paderborn; they got me the job in the hospital after they had given me a new identity and fifty marks. So until I could find myself something better, I was stuck with it and my customers were stuck with me. I certainly didn't hear any of them complaining about my bedside manner.
You'd think the dead
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could look after themselves but of course people die in hospital all the time and, when they do, they usually need a bit of help getting around. It seems the days of patient defenestration are over. It was my job to go and fetch the bodies off the wards and take them down to the house of death and there to wash them before leaving them out for collection by the undertakers. In winter we didn't worry about chilling the bodies or spraying the place for flies. We didn't have to; it was just a few degrees above freezing in the mortuary. Much of the time I worked alone and, after a month at the Schwabing Hospital, I suppose I was almost used to it-to the cold, to the smell, and to the feeling of being alone and yet not quite alone, if you know what I mean. Once or twice a corpse moved by itself-they do that sometimes, wind usually-which, I'll admit, was a little unnerving. But perhaps not surprising. I'd been alone for so long that I'd started talking to the radio. At least I assumed that's where the voices were coming from. In the country that produced Luther, Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler, you can never be absolutely sure about these things.
On that particular night I had to go up to the emergency room and fetch a corpse that would have given Dante pause for thought. An unexploded bomb-it's estimated that there are tens of thousands of these buried all over Munich, which often makes reconstruction work hazardous-had gone off in nearby Moosach, killing at least one and injuring several others in a local beer hall that took the worst of the blast. I heard it go off just before I started my shift and it sounded like a standing ovation in Asgard. If the glass in the window in my room
On that particular night I had to go up to the emergency room and fetch a corpse that would have given Dante pause for thought. An unexploded bomb-it's estimated that there are tens of thousands of these buried all over Munich, which often makes reconstruction work hazardous-had gone off in nearby Moosach, killing at least one and injuring several others in a local beer hall that took the worst of the blast. I heard it go off just before I started my shift and it sounded like a standing ovation in Asgard. If the glass in the window in my room
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Autoren-Porträt von Philip Kerr
Philip Kerr was the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Bernie Gunther novels, three of which-Field Gray, The Lady from Zagreb, and Prussian Blue-were finalists for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Kerr also won several Shamus Awards and the British Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. Just before his death in 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. As P.B. Kerr, he was the author of the much-loved young adult fantasy series Children of the Lamp.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Philip Kerr
- 2018, 528 Seiten, Maße: 14,9 x 22,8 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Penguin US
- ISBN-10: 052553511X
- ISBN-13: 9780525535119
- Erscheinungsdatum: 21.03.2018
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for Greeks Bearing Gifts"A terrifically complex tale ... a beautifully written novel by a gifted writer who has left us too soon." - Washington Post
"It doesn't take much to get swept into Gunther's latest adventure or taken in by his darkly witty commentary." - Chicago Tribune
"Every bit as powerful and atmospheric and addictively page-turning as all the ones that came before it."- Christian Science Monitor
"For bereft Kerr aficionados, this is a draught of vintage, as themes of redemption
are grippingly explored." - The Guardian
"Bernie Gunther...is back - which is good news for all readers... What makes this latest Bernie book notable is how it strikes a series of authentic notes." - The Washington Times
"Beyond Marlowe, though, there's Bernie...Bernie's internal demons have always provided the compelling drama in this series, and here we loyal supporters are granted a ray of hard-won hope. It provides a great moment in an always-riveting series." -Booklist, starred review
"In typical top form, Kerr provides valuable insights into the times...Inspired by real people and events, the latest novel by the celebrated author of the Berlin Noir trilogy is a deep but breezy work in which even the most trustworthy characters can harbor dark secrets."-Kirkus Review, starred review
"An outstanding historical thriller steeped in intrigue with a superb narrative, pace, and characterization."-Library Journal, starred review
"Once again, Kerr shows Bernie contending bravely if futilely against powerful forces whose full evil becomes clear only at the end."-Publishers Weekly
"Greeks Bearing Gifts is the 13th Bernie book, each of them a polished gem of unsentimental detective writing echoing Chandler and Hammett in spirit, if not language. ... The entire series of books balances on the shoulders of Bernie Gunther, surely one of the most likable and confounding characters in modern detective fiction - or, it should be said, in contemporary
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English literature in general. For that is what Kerr has created, not mere formulaic genre novels, and Bernie's moral ambiguity has a lot to do with the magnetic power of Kerr's work." - San Antonio Express-News
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