Metropolis

Summer 1928. Berlin a city where nothing is verboten. In the night streets political gangs wander looking for fights. Daylight reveals a beleaguered populace barely recovering from the postwar inflation often jobless reeling from the reparations imposed by the victors. At central police HQ the Murder Commission has its hands full. A killer is on the loose and though he scatters many clues each is a dead end. It's almost as if he is taunting the cops. Meanwhile the press is having a field day. This is what Bernie Gunther finds on his first day with the Murder Commisson. He's been taken on beacuse the people at the top have noticed him--they think he has the makings of a first-rate detective. But not just yet. Right now he has to listen and learn. Metropolis completed just before Philip Kerr's untimely death is the capstone of a fourteen-book journey through the life of Kerr's signature character Bernhard Genther a sardonic and wisecracking homicide detective caught up in an increasingly Nazified Berlin police department. In many ways it is Bernie's origin story and as Kerr's last novel it is also alas his end. Metropolis is also a tour of a city in chaos: of its seedy sideshows and sex clubs of the underground gangs that run its rackets and its bewildered citizens--the lost the homeless the abandoned. It is Berlin as it edges toward the new world order that Hitler will soo usher in. And Bernie? He's a quick study and he's learning a lot. Including to his chagrin that when push comes to shove he isn't much better than the gangsters in doing whatever her must to get what he wants.