Berlin Noir Omnibus (March Violets, the Pale Criminal, a German Requiem)

Amazon.com Review

Now published in one paperback volume, these three mysteries are

exciting and insightful looks at life inside Nazi Germany -- richer and

more readable than most histories of the period. We first meet

ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of

derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The

Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are

beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and

Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high

into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem,

the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as

Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more

death than he imagines. (For a review of Kerr's latest novel, The Grid, see our Thrillers section.)