The Pale Criminal - Philip Kerr

Category: Crime, Detective, Military
Language: English
Keywords: Blackmail Crime Nazi Occult

Written by Philip Kerr
Read by John Lee
Format: M4B
Unabridged

It is September 1938. In a sweltering heat wave, the German people anxiously await the outcome of the Munich conference, wondering if the Führer will plunge Europe into another war.

Private investigator Bernhard Gunther, formerly of Kripo—the Berlin criminal police—is hired by a rich widow to find out who is blackmailing her, an investigation in which he finds himself exploring the crankier side of modern German medicine and psychotherapy. Meanwhile, a brutal serial killer stalks the streets of Berlin, and Kripo, embarrassed at having been caught framing an innocent Jew for the murders, is not above using a little blackmail to obtain Gunther’s racially unbiased services to catch the real culprit. Boldly asking for the temporary rank of Kommissar, Gunther finds that a murder hunt for a perverted criminal soon escalates beyond all his predictions.

THE PALE CRIMINAL is Philip Kerr’s second novel. Hard-hitting, fast-paced, and unfailingly witty, it is a powerful exploration of the occult side of Nazism and a skillful evocation of the social tensions that pervaded prewar Berlin.