IF THE DEAD RISE NOT

This sixth book in Kerr’s Bernie Gunther detective series is not the jumping-in point for a newcomer to the saga of a former German policeman, now a hotel house detective in 1934 Berlin. The deep-noir plot gives Paul Hecht plenty of opportunity to display Bernie’s cool imperturbability in circumstances that include being interrogated by police and being in the throes of passion with an American writer who is in town to write about the upcoming Berlin Olympics and its exclusion of Jews. Hecht offers a guttural tone to portray the malevolent Nazis but, in the novel’s second part, set 20 years later in Havana, does little to flavor the musical speech of the Cuban natives and émigrés. Nonetheless, Hecht skillfully captures Bernie’s Chandleresque wisecracking. B.V.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2010]