A German Requiem Book

To start this book finishes Philip Kerrs' Berlin Noir trilogy and while the story starts in Berlin 1947, a city under siege by the communist threat, most of it plays in Vienna. So I would label this last book more Vienna Noir than anything.
This whole book was guided by my internal soundtrack of Orson Welles The third man mostly by Anton Karas who played the famous theme on the zither. Which is perhaps not that odd when you consider the story told in this novel and the amount both have in common and not just the same era. Fitting that Kerr lets his book end on a movie set for the same movie.

Bernie Gunther in his post-WWII Berlin finds live violent and difficult after escaping from a Russian Prisoner-of-war-camp. His wife does everything to survive and he has some difficulty with that. It is good that his private detective work sends him of to Vienna where he is asked to prove his former colleague's innocence. Vienna like Berlin is a divided city in which the Russians also have a rather large foothold. In this ancient town there is a whole world of darkness filled by prostitution, black markets, spy-craft and murder. Bernie has to find his way through this maze of deception and is often not sure on whose side he is working and why. And of course the old Nazis have been beaten but are they really down and out?

This book is about the shadowy underbelly of the WWII and how the various parties were dividing the remnants of the Nazi Empire in all its knowledge and resources. Scarily enough the choices made were more often than not so morally sound as we would like to be. Bernie is as always on nobody's side but busy with surviving but not at any cost.

A good book written about the postwar cruelty that existed in Europe after WWII, and the shadows that were at work to build a new world. For anybody who expected the world to become a better place after the gruesome excesses of WWII a bit of unwanted insight in the real world.

A well written book and Kerr did a much better job than in his last attempt where his sexual politics were poor to terrible. In this book he does a much better job and also explained the world after the war which is at no time pretty and does not use any apologies for it.
This book is less of a detective story and far more a spy story and as such Vienna was the right place to set the tale.
I remembered with this book why I liked the Bernie Gunther stories and can only conclude that with his later books he did Bernie justice, as does this one.