Metropolis

✍ Scribed by Philip Kerr

• Publisher: Penguin;Quercus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 218 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero's origins, exploring Bernie Gunther's first weeks on Berlin's Murder Squad.

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.

**

Review

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Mysteries & Thrillers of Spring 2019

"This book is plenty timely. But completed shortly before the author's death, it is also one of Kerr's most congenial, beautifully controlled, and entertaining works. The banter is priceless. Going against the grainas usualby writing an origin novel as his swan song, Kerr leaves his fans happy."***Kirkus Reviews *(starred review)****

"Gripping... Kerr does a fine job of immersing the reader in the seamy side of Weimar Germany... Fans will be sorry to see the last of the honest, wisecracking Bernie."*Publishers Weekly*

About the Author

Philip Kerr was the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Bernie Gunther novels, three of which--Field Gray, The Lady from Zagreb, and Prussian Blue--were finalists for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Kerr has also won several Shamus Awards and the British Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. Just before his death in 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. as P.B. Kerr, he is the author of the much-loved young adult fantasy series Children of the Lamp.