The thirteenth adventure featuring Bernie Gunther lives up to the high and entertaining standards of the previous novels. This one, set in 1957, finds Gunther back in Germany after spending years in South America, Cuba and France, living under an assumed name and still anxious to avoid both the police and ex-Nazis after his earlier life. He is in a quiet job, working in a Munich mortuary, when through an old acquaintance, he is offered a post as claims investigator with an insurance firm. What Bernie thinks will be another quiet role, quickly turns dangerous, first with a run-in with an ex-colleague policeman and then being sent to Athens to investigate a claim for a sunken boat. As ever, Kerr ramps up the tension with some wonderful plotting and crisp dialogue as Bernie become ensnared in a plot by ex-Nazis and he is forced to work for the Greek police and the Israeli Ha’ Mossad.

Bernie is offered a job as an insurance assessor for Munich RE and one of his first jobs is to go to Greece to assess a claim for a sunken ship. Little does he realise it will bring him back in touch with Nazi war criminals. As always populated with a number of real characters and shines a light on the horrific treatment of the Thessalonian Jews by the Nazis. It also hints at the way some ex-Nazis evaded trials for war crimes and were used by the Americans, Germans, Egyptians and Syrians. ( )

Greeks Bearing Gifts, by Philip Kerr is another offering in the author’s Bernie Gunther series. If you haven’t read any books in this series, you should know that Bernie is a German who served in the German police prior to World War II. When the Nazi’s came to power, he never joined the political party. He did however continue as a commissar investigating murders which occurred during this troubled period. He is constantly torn between maintaining his humanity in a world that has gone mad and serving his bosses. If he did not produce results he would no doubt quickly become just another statistic. In this book taking place after the war, Bernie finds himself in Greece working as an insurance adjuster for a German company. He is living under an assumed named as his history continues to follow him even though the war has ended. He is not alone in this as familiar faces from his past crop up to complicate his life. Bernie battles to maintain his freedom and what is left of his humanity. For those of us who have read previous books in the series the gift here is the chance to once again follow Bernie’s constant struggle to salvage some good out of his checkered past. ( )

Another intelligent adventure, another moral dilemma of conscience, for our anti-hero, Bernie. With no compromise on his principles, he manages to lose the beautiful woman, which seemed inevitable all along. Bernie works hard to achieve little, but Kerr moves the action briskly, with superior readability. One feels, deeply, the heavy, corrupt atmosphere, so typical of post WWII Europe. Kerr's characters fill his books with believable reactions to the chaos that seems, at times, to overwhelm them. I feel this author's style compelling, and I am drawn, time and again, to Kerr, and his Bernie. Unfortunately, his work was limited by his early death, in 2018. ( )

I thought the storyline was tangential & difficult to follow. ( )