The Lady from ZagrebBy Philip KerrG.P. Putnam’s Sons/Marian Wood, 2015World Gone ByBy Dennis LehaneWilliam Morrow, 2015Bernie Gunther, my favorite gimlet-eyed gumshoe, is back. The smartass German detective who we last saw in A Man Without Breath (2013) returns in The Lady from Zagreb. It is the summer of 1942 and Bernie, ever a reluctant SS member, is now an officer in German Intelligence, the SD: “Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.”With his knack for unwillingly making friends in high places, Bernie has been dragooned into making a speech at an international police conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee:

“My idea of public speaking is to shout for a beer from the back of the bar. …With my speaking skills I’d never have gotten Antonio off the hook with Shylock. No, not even in Germany.”

Protestations aside, his speech earns kudos as being less boring than most of them. It leads to a job in the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau courtesy of General Arthur Nebe. It’s another case of an unwanted string being pulled in his favor. Nebe, until the previous November, had commanded SS Operation Group B in Byelorussia. It was bruited about that he had ordered the deaths of more than forty-five thousand people before he earned his ticket back to Berlin. Bernie has no reason to doubt this. He is also, in the circumstances, Nebe’s captive audience:

“Bernie this is a good deal for you. It gets you out of the Alex and into somewhere your skills will be properly appreciated…your uniform and investigative experience will open a few investigative doors that remain closed to the people who currently work there. Von this and von that lawyers most of them, the wing-collar kind whose scars were earned in university societies rather than on the battlefield."

As Bernie once said in another context in The One from the Other (2009): “My only choice was between the disastrous and the unpalatable. A very German choice.”Cut to almost a year after the crime conference in Wannsee. Bernie is still working for the War Crimes Bureau. He is summoned to the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda to meet with the Minister himself, Joseph Goebbels. “In truth,” Bernie reveals, “we’d met once or twice before.”In fact, Bernie “affectionately” refers to the diabolical doctor and confidant of Hitler as Joey (occasionally as the Mahatma Propagandhi). More to the point, he’s recently been the eyes and ears for Joey in the Katyn Forest massacre of 4,000 Polish officers by the Red Army. Bernie helped facilitate the international investigation which turned out to have incalculable propaganda value for Goebbels. Now he’s been summoned to the Minister’s office and offered the opportunity to work for him (hush hush) in a private capacity:

“The job will not be without its pleasures but it’s a task that requires some very special skills….It requires the services of a detective with a proven reputation…. You’re a good man in a tight spot. And that’s what I’m in right now…. I know you’re not a Nazi. I’ve read your Gestapo file—which, by the way, is as thick as a DeMille screenplay and probably just as entertaining. Frankly, if you were a Nazi you’d be no fucking good to me…. This is a private matter. Do I make myself clear?”

For Bernie, who worships the god of self-preservation, it couldn’t be clearer:

By now I was starting to guess which one of the two people in the room to whose advantage this job really was, and it didn’t look like it was going to be me.

What he couldn’t have guessed is that Goebbels wants him to meet with Dalia Dresner. She’s in need of a detective. She’s also one of the biggest film stars in Germany, incredibly beautiful, and Goebbels worships her. She’s hell-bent on finding her father, a priest in Croatia, and bringing him back to Berlin—a reunion that Goebbels hopes will keep the actress in Germany. The real Goebbels, Kerr recounts in his end notes, was an avid film buff and had affairs with a great many film actresses. Dalia is based in part on Hedley Lamarr and Pola Negri.Tracking Dalia’s father down may be a loathsome assignment, especially given conditions in Croatia, but Bernie’s introduction to the lady is anything but. She greets him in her lavish villa in the ravishing buff and for the cynical sleuth it’s love at first sight, so to speak. It’s the beginning of a dangerous love affair carried on behind Goebbels back.On Dalia’s behalf, Bernie embarks on what he believes to be a search and rescue mission. His harrowing journey leads him to Jasenovac, a concentration camp on the border between Croatia and Bosnia. It’s the scene of unspeakable acts against humanity. Its garden décor of severed human heads “made Goya’s disasters of war look like a set of illustrated place mats.” The man in charge is Dalia’s father. He’s now Colonel Dragan and has morphed from priest to monster which places Bernie on the horns of a major dilemma. He decides to tell Dalia her father is dead.As he explains to Goebbels:

“The alternative is that I tell her the truth and she has to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life. There’s no telling what that will do to a person.”Goebbels nodded. “You’re right. No one should have to go through life bearing that kind of cross. …And it might be hard for her to play the leading role in this film knowing her father was a monster like this man you met.”For a moment I wondered what Goebbels’ several children would think about their father’s crimes when, one day, the Nazis were history.

Like his protagonist, Philip Kerr has a finely tuned sense of irony and amoral angst. Wartime Berlin, Zurich, Zagreb and beyond are brilliantly evoked. As is the noir aspect of the German cinema of the time. It travels from the brutal killing fields of Croatia to the seeming peace of Switzerland where Bernie runs up against Allen Dulles’s murderous operatives as well as highly suspect Swiss-German dealings. Among a terrific series of vignettes is one involving the young Kurt Waldheim. Dalia, Kerr’s “favorite female foil of them all to date,” turns out to have nothing on Mata Hari! The Lady from Zagreb is a rousingly good historical thriller and the most penetrating, worldly-wise Bernie Gunther novel to date.To go from Nazis to American gangsters is probably not as big a leap as you might think. World Gone By is Dennis Lehane’s twelfth novel and the third in the “Coughlin trilogy”. It continues the epic story of former crime kingpin Joe Coughlin, who made his debut in The Given Day (2008) and returned with a vengeance in the Edgar Award-winning novel Live by Night (2012).It is late spring, 1943. The world is at war and the American mob is flourishing. To them, Hitler is merely “A Kraut midget”. (What would Bernie Gunther do with that?) It’s been ten years since Joe Coughlin lost his wife in a rain of gunfire. He has had enough of gangland (shades of Michael Corleone) and is now trying to raise his ten-year-old son Tomas peacefully in Ybor City, rum-running capital of Florida. The heady days of Prohibition are long gone and Joe has carved out a niche as consigliere to the Bartolo Crime Family in Tampa. With his blessing, his old Boston friend Dion Bartolo is now in charge:

At parties the boss of bosses, Dion Bartolo, showed off the kind of dance moves that had won him prizes in his adolescence. In the process, he gave the mothers and daughters of some of Tampa’s most respectable families stories to tell their grandchildren. (“No man who dances with such grace can be as bad as some have claimed.)

Joe is a master at staying far enough out of the business to remain on the good side of everyone. Operating deep in the shadows, Joe navigates his way through the lethal, ever expanding mob world controlled by Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. He is instrumental in their growing relationship with Fulgencio Batista, who rules a corrupt Cuba with an iron fist:

Joe Coughlin had a gift for bringing the beacons of the city into contact with her demons and making it all seems like a lark…. Joe Coughlin was the bridge in this town between what was proclaimed in public and how it was achieved in private.

Once again (see Live by Night), Joe has forged everything out of nothing: money, influence, and a secret relationship with a beautiful, well connected woman. Joe, ever the confident fixer, is continuing to juggle multiple balls (competing loyalties, a powerful mistress, the needs of his son) while dealing with a major crisis head on. Word arrives from a prison inmate (reliable) that someone has placed a contract on Joe’s life.To the rational side of Joe that someone was trying to kill him made no sense. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d pissed off anyone of note:

If there was such a thing as an irreplaceable asset in the Bartolo family, it was him. And not just to the Bartolo Family; he was integral to Lansky’s operations so, by extension, he was integral to Luciano’s…. He could assure himself that there was no earthly reason anyone would want him dead….But the rumor, however vague, insubstantial, and unsubstantiated was about him.

Now it’s a race against time to find out who wants him dead and who remains loyal to him among the living. He’s got to face the fact that he’s got a lot of skeletons from his former life in the closet. The trick is to eradicate them without wreaking havoc on those he is closest to.World Gone By culminates in a powerful, heartbreaking climax in which the wages of a lifetime of sin are finally paid in full. This is an utterly magnetic novel on every level, a reimagining of the great themes of popular fiction—crime, family, passion, betrayal and redemption—set against a complex and spellbinding world that can never be taken for granted.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.