Loose lips still sinking ships
Ex-SS sleuth’s nautical mystery connects Athens to Auschwitz.
Bernie Gunther is one of fiction’s more lugubrious wise-cracking detectives. In 1957, still hiding from his SS past, the former Berlin cop has washed up as the night-shift man at a Munich hospital morgue. But as loyal readers of the late Philip Kerr’s Gunther mysteries will know – GREEKS BEARING GIFTS (Hachette, $37.99) is the 13th in the series – it’s never very long before gloomy Bernie’s past catches up with him once again. In short order, an old acquaintance
leads to a new job as an insurance assessor and Gunther is dispatched to Greece to investigate a claim by a German diver whose ship has sunk after catching fire. With wearisome inevitability, the investigation leads back to the war – the ship was stolen from a Greek Jew sent to Auschwitz – and the mystery deepens when the claimant is found shot through both eyes. Soon, a local cop blackmails Gunther into helping catch a war criminal, and Mossad threatens poor old Bernie, too. There’s plenty going on, and at a gallop. But Kerr’s thrillers usually thrill a little more. There’s a flatness to the tone, the mystery and even to Bernie’s hardboiled one-liners and his compulsory doomed romance with a younger woman. Both author and hero are going through the motions. Gloomy Bernie’s old acquaintances may forgive it, but his new ones may not.
When Rachel was 19, she “disappeared, like a lasso dropped from the clouds and snatched her up”. Her sister, Grace, then 12, embarked on what would become a pair of obsessions: writing a survivor’s notebook, and keeping a file of possible suspects and of other long-lost young women. There was a prime suspect, a once-famous photographer, Carl Louis Feldman. He was never convicted; he faded into obscurity and has now drifted into dementia. He lives in a halfway house for the old and poor, as lost as those girls. Grace finds Carl and presents herself as his forgotten daughter. She persuades him to let her take him on a last road trip through Texas. She has a map and a book of his photographs. She wants to trick him into finding three of the women she believes he has killed. In Julia Heaberlin’s
PAPER GHOSTS ($37, Penguin/Random House) the setting is, lyrically, rural Texas, and the confines of the car. Grace has to develop a sort of trust with Carl in these physically and psychologically claustrophobic quarters. The examination of their relationship is the best thing about a smart thriller which pits sharp perception against the blurriness of memory.
In EVERYTHING IS LIES (Penguin/Random
House, $37) by Helen Callaghan, Sophia, a young architect working in London, returns home to Suffolk, where her parents own a rundown garden centre. She finds her mother hanging from a tree. Her father is critically wounded. The scene is decreed a murder-suicide, which makes no sense to Sophia.
She gets a call from a publisher asking for the final third of a memoir her mother has been writing. This makes no sense, either. Her mother, Nina, had lived a dull life as a near-recluse. The memoir begins with Nina, at university in Cambridge in the late 80s. She falls in with a glamorous, drug-taking, hard-drinking group who live off campus in a grand house. The group’s leader is a famous pop star, Aaron, who Nina falls head over heels in love with. Behind the heady, drug-fuelled high jinks there are weirder things going on. The group members worship Aaron, who has looks and charisma and is a complete bastard.
The memoir is about what really happened and what really happened is just what a number of people don’t want revealed. The secrets are contained within Nina’s last notebook, which Sophia finds and reads. This is an effective device; we find out what the lies and the secrets are at the same moments she does. The memoir is a page-turner and so is the novel.