Bernard Gunther Books in Order

Berlin, 1928. Newly promoted from Vice to the Murder Commission, young Bernie Gunther is thrown into a city of veterans, cabarets and rising political thugs. As he chases a killer scalping prostitutes and another targeting disabled ex soldiers, he begins to understand the darkness gathering around him.

In 1957 Bernie has reinvented himself as an insurance claims investigator in Munich. A case involving a sunken ship takes him to Athens, where questions about wartime looting, missing Jewish gold and a murdered former Wehrmacht sailor pull him into the shadow of old atrocities and new enemies.

Bernie is on the run from the East German Stasi in 1956, trying to slip out of France before his pursuers catch up. As he travels, he remembers an earlier assignment in 1939 at Hitler’s mountain retreat in Bavaria, where he had just days to solve a politically explosive shooting.

On the French Riviera in 1956, a world weary Bernie is working as a hotel concierge when writer and former spy Somerset Maugham asks for help with a blackmailer. What begins as a discreet favour soon entangles Bernie in Cold War secrets, old betrayals and a dangerous woman with her own agenda.

Ordered by Joseph Goebbels to assist a dazzling Croatian film star, Bernie is drawn into her search for an estranged father and into the propaganda machinery of the Third Reich. The trail takes him from Berlin studios to war torn Yugoslavia and neutral Switzerland, where personal desire clashes with political horror.

It is 1943 and Bernie has been drafted into the Wehrmacht’s War Crimes Bureau. Sent to Smolensk to investigate mass graves in the Katyn Forest, he is meant to produce a verdict useful for Nazi propaganda, but instead finds himself pulled into army plots against Hitler and fresh killings at the front.

In 1941 Bernie is summoned by Reinhard Heydrich to a country estate outside Prague, where Nazi officials gather for a weekend of drinking and intrigue. When murder strikes inside the heavily guarded house, Bernie must untangle personal grudges and political loyalties before the Protector of Bohemia loses patience.

In 1954 Bernie finds himself in American custody and is grilled about his wartime past. His story unfolds through flashbacks that take him from prewar Berlin to the Eastern Front, French prisons and Soviet labour camps, as he is repeatedly forced to choose between survival and complicity.

As house detective at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon in 1934, Bernie juggles a stolen Chinese box, a dead body and a glamorous American journalist while Olympic contracts are quietly fixed around him. Twenty years later in Batista’s Havana, an old flame and a vicious gangster drag him back into that unfinished story.

After being mistaken for a war criminal, Bernie is smuggled to Buenos Aires in 1950 and given a new identity by the Perón government. Local police push him into investigating a mutilated girl and a missing banker’s daughter, crimes that echo an unsolved Berlin case from before the war.

Munich, 1949. Working again as a private eye, Bernie is hired to find a missing SS war criminal and confirm whether he is dead. The search leads him through amnesty campaigns, Vatican and American escape routes and Jewish vengeance groups, forcing him to decide who deserves his help.

In the winter of 1947, Bernie travels to ruined Vienna to help an old police colleague accused of killing an American officer. Among Allied occupiers, ex Nazis and black marketeers, he uncovers a web of espionage and escape networks that shows the war is far from over.

Set in 1938, Bernie Gunther is blackmailed back into official work and forced to investigate a serial killer targeting blond German girls while also handling a sordid blackmail case. As he hunts the murderer he has to navigate Gestapo rivalries and the growing madness of the regime.

In 1936 Berlin, ex cop turned private investigator Bernie Gunther is hired by an industrialist to recover a stolen diamond necklace and look into the deaths of his daughter and son in law. The job drags Bernie into Nazi power games, Gestapo attention and a brutal visit to Dachau.