John Sklar's Office

Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This may be the last of the Bernie Gunther books. He died in March, 2018. You can read his obituary in the Guardian. He was just 62. This book, like the whole series, shows us some of the emotions and conflicts people have in impossible situations. To quote the obit about Bernie Gunther: "morally ambiguous fictional private detective Bernie Gunther first appeared in March Violets (1989), set in the city in 1936, after the Nazis’ rise to power, and the first of his Berlin Noir trilogy. Each book, he later admitted, was aimed at painting Gunther into a corner “so that he can’t cross the floor without getting paint on his shoes”

Bernie's life before, during and after the war shows him filled with massive ambiguity and some moral ambivalence too. I love that this character seems not just real but gritty and thoughtful in a way that real people might never be. He sees things in ways that are interesting and enlightening. I read and reread parts of this book because they were telling the truth about people and history, truth that has often been obscured by current events.

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