The One From The Other

The One From The Other (2006) is another entertaining installment in the Bernie Gunther private detective series from Philip Kerr. This time it is 1949 and—after being forced to serve in the SS—Bernie has moved to Munich to reestablish himself as a private investigator. When the beautiful Frau Britta Warzok hires him for an apparently simple job in Vienna, Bernie’s finds himself the victim of a frame up. Kerr has created a compelling narrative. And there's plenty of great hard-boiled dialogue as usual, for example Gunther says: "Schiller? Sure. He's the guy who said that the truth lives on in the midst of deception. We keep that quotation over the office door. He's the patron saint of detectives everywhere." There's plenty of great historical details through as well-details like the "Nakam" or Vengeance squads where small groups of European Jews avenged the murders of Jews by Nazis. The novels opens with Bernie doing a job in Israel where he meets Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen-a historical fact. Furthermore, the American Office of Scientific Research and Development did conduct medical experiment son prisoners in state penitentiaries to an effort to develop a vaccine for malaria in 1945 as recorded in a Life magazine from that year.