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Se Os Mortos Não Ressuscitam (2012)

by Philip Kerr(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Porto Editora

series

Bernard Gunther

review 1: The first thing I should note is that this completes the Bernhard Gunther books thus far published. I'm sure there will be more.Once again, Kerr creates parallel stories, but this time it's the characters who tie the two sections together. One is the true love of Bernie's life (who, strangely, has not been mentioned in other stories) and one is corrupt American who moves pretty freely between criminal and legitimate worlds.We begin in 1934, when Bernie is working as the hotel detective at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. He is confronted by the death of a guest and the theft of a valuable objet d'art from another. Around the same time he meets a friend of the hotel's owners, who is trying to prepare an article to convince the American government to boycott the 1936 Olympics.A lo... moret of threads to tie together in a very intriguing story. As always, there are betrayals, faces hidden under masks, a world of ulterior motives, and lies galore. The first two thirds of this book is as well-done as anything Kerr has done anywhere: well-drawn characters, intricate plot developments and a delightful mystery.I'm of two minds about the final third, which takes us forward in time to 1954 Havana, where Bernie, now Carlos Hausner, is living pretty well, although he'd like to return to Germany and he's in the process of making a business deal that would allow him to do just that. But he encounters two characters from the earlier section of the book and they begin a process of dragging him away from his goal. There's a murder, a cache of weapons, some rather sordid police and military officials of the Cuban Government, and lots of American gangsters (featuring Meyer Lansky). The reason I said I'm of two minds is that Kerr telegraphed his big 'reveal' 'way too early. He does a nice job of distracting from this, by throwing in another murder, but I spent a lot of time during that last third waiting for the announcement. That distracted from the quality of the work and undermined the developments that should have been the focus of my attention.
review 2: This is a bit subpar for Kerr's series of novels about Bernard Gunther. This one is in two parts, the first taking place in Berlin in 1934, a year or so after the Nazis came to power, and the second part in Havana in 1954.In the first part, Gunther is a German homicide detective who is opposed to the Nazis and trying to survive in the new Nazified Germany. We know that he is anti-Nazi because Kerr makes sure that Gunther expresses his feelings on nearly every page of the first part. I found this constant repetition of his anti-Nazi sentiments to be a drag on the narrative (as in, "Ok, enough already!"). It also has the feel of being a bit anachronistic; Kerr seems to be writing in hindsight, as though the horrific development of Hitler and the Nazis over the following decade were already clear to the main character.The second part of the book brings Gunther and certain of the characters from the first part together again 20 years later. There's a murder mystery here which isn't all that mysterious--the answer is fairly apparent almost from the discovery of the murder. That makes this part somewhat tedious, as we wait for the obvious solution to unfold. There's also a twist at the end which sets us up for the next novel. less

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