Philip Kerr Books in Order

This anthology, edited by Philip Kerr, gathers examples of memorable lies and deceptions from history, literature and politics. Through short extracts and commentary, it shows how people have invented islands, rewritten scandals and manipulated truth for amusement, power and survival.

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.

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 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 a near future London where neuroscience can flag men predisposed to violent crime, a subject codenamed Wittgenstein hacks the government database and starts killing others like himself. Detective Jake Jakowicz hunts him through a world of brain imaging, punitive comas and unsettling moral questions.

An internal affairs lawyer from Moscow is sent to St Petersburg to observe how local police handle the newly powerful Mafia. Partnered with veteran detective Grushko, he investigates the shooting of an investigative journalist and a petty criminal, discovering just how fragile law has become in post Soviet Russia.

Architect Ray Richardson is proud of the Gridiron, a highly automated Los Angeles office tower controlled by a central computer. When a software glitch and a rogue program blur the line between safety system and game, the building begins to kill its occupants, trapping Ray and his clients inside.

After a disastrous climb in the Himalayas, mountaineer Jack Furness brings home a strange hominid skull that is far too fresh to be a fossil. With paleoanthropologist Stella Swift he organizes a secret return expedition, unaware that intelligence agencies have their own reasons to follow the trail toward the legendary yeti.

Fresh out of prison after taking the rap for a mob boss, small time crook Dave Delano plans to hijack drug money laundered in yachts being ferried across the Atlantic. Teaming up with sharp FBI agent Kate Furey, he sails into a tangle of double crosses, storms and shifting loyalties.

In the late twenty first century, a blood borne virus has infected most of humanity and clean blood is the world’s most valuable commodity. Security designer Dana Dallas, whose daughter needs costly transfusions, turns outlaw and plots an audacious robbery of the lunar bank he helped create.

In 1960 professional hitman Tom Jefferson is hired by the Mafia, in league with the CIA, to assassinate Fidel Castro. When he uncovers a sordid link between the mob and John F. Kennedy, his target changes, and Tom becomes both hunter and hunted in a conspiracy that spans Havana and Washington.

London, 1696. Young gentleman Christopher Ellis is assigned to assist Sir Isaac Newton, now Warden of the Royal Mint, in hunting down counterfeiters. A string of cryptic murders draws them into religious intrigue, alchemical secrets and a plot that could destabilize England’s fragile economy and government.

Twelve year old twins John and Philippa Gaunt discover they are descended from a powerful line of djinn and can grant wishes. Under the guidance of their eccentric Uncle Nimrod they travel from New York to London and Egypt to stop a plot involving a lost tomb and imprisoned spirits.

In 1943, as the Allies prepare for the Tehran conference, OSS operative Willard Mayer is sent to help manage secret peace feelers coming from inside the Nazi regime. Caught between Roosevelt, Stalin, Himmler and a plot to bomb the Big Three, he has to decide whose disaster to prevent.

After a legendary book of djinn magic vanishes, John and Philippa are sent to find it, only to see Philippa lured toward the cold, majestic Blue Djinn of Babylon. John and Nimrod race across Europe and the Middle East to rescue her before she loses her heart and her freedom.

When their djinn friend Buck begs for help, John and Philippa Gaunt follow a trail from New York and London to Nepal and India. There they confront the sinister Cult of the Nine Cobras and a series of snakebite murders that test the limits of their courage and their magic.

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.

John and Philippa are thrown into a race against time as an evil force awakens China’s terracotta warriors and their parents face terrible fates. To save their family and the world’s luck, the twins must crisscross the globe, outwit the wicked Iblis and stop an army of possessed statues.

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.

In 1969, thirteen year old Scott MacLeod already flies small planes with his Air Force father. After he calmly handles a mid air emergency, NASA recruits him for a secret test flight to the moon with two chimps, a mission that raises questions about risk, courage and truth.

Dispatched by the Blue Djinn to recover missing Incan artifacts, John and Philippa journey deep into the Amazon rainforest. There they face booby trapped ruins, a friend desperate to regain lost powers and a mystery that could unbalance good and bad luck across the world.

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.

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.

John and Philippa Gaunt search for an ancient fakir who holds a powerful secret that might avert worldwide misfortune. Their quest pulls them through India and beyond, into clashes with rival djinn, shifting prophecies and choices that will shape their future as guardians of luck.

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.

Volcanoes around the world begin erupting with strange golden lava, signalling a djinn scheme to plunder the grave of Genghis Khan. John and Philippa, joined by old allies, must race across Asia to stop a power hungry enemy from stealing a hoard that could upset the balance of the djinn.

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.

Gil Martins, an FBI agent in Houston’s domestic terrorism unit, is losing his faith while facing extremists of every stripe. When outspoken atheists and other high profile figures start dying in bizarre accidents, a frightened informant tells him they were killed by prayer, and his investigation veers into the uncanny.

Scott Manson, coach and fixer for London City FC, is used to keeping players, agents and owners in line. When the club’s charismatic manager is found dead at their new dockland stadium, Scott has to solve the murder while steering the team through matches and media storms.

Bestselling thriller brand John Houston fronts a literary empire largely written by ghostwriters. When his supermodel wife is found shot dead in their Monaco apartment and Houston disappears, one of those ghosts is pulled into a chase that skewers publishing vanity while unpicking a very real murder.

In 1941 Ukraine, Jewish teenager Kalinka hides on the remote Askaniya Nova nature reserve after losing her family to the Nazis. When German soldiers begin slaughtering the last wild Przewalski’s horses, she and elderly caretaker Max risk everything to lead two surviving animals across the frozen steppe to safety.

Out of work and short of options, Scott Manson considers a coaching offer in Shanghai that turns out to be a sting. Instead he ends up in Barcelona, hired to find a missing superstar forward, and follows a trail from Europe to the Caribbean through the rotten heart of international football.

On a Champions League trip to Athens, London City manager Scott Manson watches a star striker collapse and die on the pitch. Greek authorities stall and rumours of match fixing swirl, so Scott starts his own inquiry to discover whether the beautiful game has just turned lethal.

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.

Quiet, bookish Billy Shivers finds refuge in the haunted House of Books, a creaky mansion turned trap filled bookshop. When its eccentric owner announces a contest to spend the night hearing the scariest story ever written, Billy must face booby traps, ghostly tales and his own fears.

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.

In nineteenth century Richmond, Virginia, British orphan Edgar lives under a distant stepfather and the watchful eye of the household slave Scipio. Obsessed with seeing his dead mother again, he plots a terrible act that will open a door to the underworld and test the limits of his humanity.

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.

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.

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.