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A Man Without Breath (2013)

by Philip Kerr(Favorite Author)

4.03 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0399160795 (ISBN13: 9780399160790)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

A Marian Wood Book/Putnam

series

Bernard Gunther

review 1: Probably this book deserved a higher rating than a 3 but the time period and subject are so dark that it is hard to say that I enjoyed the book. It was well written and the story seems to be accurately rooted in history (the Karyn Massacre in Poland, the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, the old Prussian military's sellout to Hitler, etc.) It's my first book in the series and I'm not quite sure what to make of Bernie Gunther and his times. He's a former Berlin policeman who hates the Nazis but who wants to survive them so he walks a very narrow moral twistrope. In this book, he's working for the German Army's War Crimes Unit, investigating the Karyn Woods massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets. There's a superficial little "love interest" in the novel but otherwise, it is... more a well written detective novel as Gunther solves the murders that occur as the larger investigation into the massacre is going on. Kerr is very good with setting and atmosphere, too.
review 2: This is not a book for the faint-hearted. The author has set the main part of the plot in the Katyn Wood area but although the massacre has already taken place, blood continues to flow as the hero investigates the events in this bleak corner of Europe. I found it the most satisfying of the Gunther series of novels. It is a long book and I suspect that the author decided not to trim it because the historical materiel was so strong. The whodunnit element is incidental. This is a story of the depths to which humanity can sink. Let us not forget that the Katyn massacre was denied by the Soviets until the 1990s. The irony of the Nazis using this event as a propaganda tool is searing. less

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