Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr

Published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam on April 3, 2018

Having returned to Germany at the end of Prussian Blue, Bernie Gunther is now Christof Ganz, a hospital mortuary attendant. He washes the dead, a fitting job for a man whose life has spent his life surrounded by death. A second job as a pallbearer suits him just as well. But being near Munich, it’s only a matter of time before a cop recognizes him as an ex-cop.

The cop spends his off-duty hours working as a private detective. The founder of the All-German People’s Party (GVP) has hired the cop to determine whether the GVP’s new donor is still a Nazi. The cop is planning a double-cross and threatens to expose Gunther if Gunther doesn’t help him carry out his plan.

By the time that story concludes, Gunther has a new job as an insurance adjuster. His boss send him to Athens, where a claim has been made for a ship that was lost in a fire at sea. The ill-tempered German owner of the ship is a bit mysterious, in part because he carries a gun wherever he goes, in part because he’s refusing to make a claim for artifacts he recovered on a dive that he says were lost when the ship sank.

One murder later, Gunther finds himself chasing a Nazi war criminal named Alois Brunner who has adopted a new identity and whose connection to the ship owner is not immediately clear. Gunther also needs the help of a German scapegoat who is sitting in a Greek prison, the only German the Greeks have been able to find who might have some connection to the Nazi occupation, so they want to throw the book at him. Gunther hopes the man can lead him to a bigger fish and thus appease the Greek authorities he’s helping so they don’t hang him for the murder, notwithstanding their knowledge that he didn’t commit it. Gunther also needs to help a Mossad agent from Israel or face the prospect of catching a bullet in the back.

Greeks Bearing Gifts features the moral conundrums that make Bernie Gunther novels so worthwhile. Is it morally acceptable to betray a casual friend if the friend enriched himself at the expense of Holocaust victims? Is it morally acceptable to enrich yourself at the expense of Holocaust victims who are going to die anyway? Is it morally acceptable to withhold information about marital status from a woman who is interested in you if you fear that the woman plans to shoot you after she seduces you? Bernie is far from perfect, but his life is instructive as he struggles toward morally sound answers to those questions and others.

The plot of Greek Bearing Gifts has elements of a whodunit and a police procedural, but it isn’t either of those. Bernie manages to puzzle out all the connections between the sunken ship and the dead bodies, but as is usually the case, the real puzzle is not whether Bernie will get the girl (although he has a chance to get one), but whether he will still be alive at the end of the story. The plot ultimately turns on complex international relations after World War II, but the story works because of the morally complex life of Bernie Gunther.

It seems like each new Gunther novel shifts the direction of Gunther’s life, and this one is no exception. I’m not sure I will like the new direction Gunther is taking (I would hate to see him freed from the moral quandaries that define him), but we’ll see. While not as suspenseful as some Gunther novels, Greeks Bearing Gifts pushes all the morally ambiguous buttons that fans of the series have come to expect.

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