Field Gray by Philip Kerr

Bernie Gunther is cynical, sarcastic, intelligent and basically a good man. He loves his country but not its leadership. His country? Germany in the 1930s. In the first book in this excellent series, March Violets, Gunther is a cop in Berlin. In later books, he becomes a PI, then has to live on the run in Argentina then Cuba. In Field Gray, we find out what happened to Bernie during the war.

I love the character of Gunther, who manages to survive the war, a concentration camp, a Soviet labor camp, betrayal, assassination attempts and interrogation by the CIA without losing his sense of humor. But Field Gray was not my favorite book in this series. While I appreciated learning what happened to Bernie during the war, the story bounces around so much between decades and has SO many characters, that it was hard to keep everything straight. And while Kerr gives vivid descriptions of life in a Soviet labor camp, the humor from the other books--which is a good counterpoint to all the bleakness and despair--is largely missing in Field Gray. (I also didn't appreciate the anti-American "digs," which I've noticed have been popping up lately in the works of more than one British author.)

So while I am interested in what happens to Bernie Gunther next, I hope Philip Kerr can get this series back to the level of the earliest books.