It is the eighth novel in the Bernie Gunther Historical Fiction detective series, recounting the adventures of a German detective in Nazi Germany and West Germany. The setting is the fall of 1941. Bernie Gunther is back in Berlin. His eyewitness experience of the horrors of the Holocaust on the Eastern Front led him to request a transfer to a front line unit. Instead he was sent back to the capital and his old job with the "Kripo", or criminal police.
Bernie is called out to investigate the murder of a Dutch guest worker, stabbed to death by the railroad tracks. Soon after, he saves a woman, one Arianne Tauber, from being raped by a knife-wielding assailant. It turns out that the man who assaulted Arianne, one Franz Koci, is also the man who killed the Dutch laborer. Bernie is unpleasantly surprised to find out that the guy with the knife is part of the "Three Kings
", a Czech resistance group that has been conducting bombing and sabotage in Germany. Arianne tells Bernie that actually, she wasn't being raped; her assailant was trying to retrieve a mysterious package that she had been paid to deliver.
While all that's going on, Bernie is summoned to Prague, the capital of what used to be Czechoslovakia. None other than Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most senior members of the Nazi government and one of the most evil, wants Bernie to investigate what he believes is an assassination plot against him, possibly organized by the Three Kings.
Tropes:
- Anachronic Order: For the series as a whole, but averted within the book. While the series as a whole had followed Bernie from 1936 to 1954, the sixth and seventh novels had lengthy flashbacks. This one is straight chronological except for a How We Got Here prologue, but it jumps back to 1941 to fill in more of Bernie's experiences due to the war.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Invoked by Heydrich when he explains why he killed Kuttner: in his mind, better Kuttner dies quietly in a way that can be hushed up than make his parents (whom Heydrich admits to being fond of) endure the shame of their son being publicly disgraced and shipped off to a punishment battalion.
- Call-Forward: The time frame of Bernie's narration isn't specified but it's sometime well after the war, and a couple of times he makes reference to future events. As Konrad Henlein fumbles with his glasses, Bernie remarks that four years later, Henlein would shatter those glasses and use the glass shards to kill himself by slitting his wrists.
- Cassandra Truth: Bernie comments more than once, including once directly to Heydrich, that Heydrich's habit of riding from the castle to Prague in an open car without an escort is recklessly dangerous. Heydrich laughs, assuming the threat of reprisal is too terrible for the Czechs to dare attack him. He is wrong, as a team of Czech assassins inserted by the British ambush Heydrich's car and kill him in the late spring of 1942.
- Central Theme: The evil and depravity of Nazi Germany, but specifically the Holocaust. Bernie Gunther is traumatized and suffering nightmares over what he saw on the Eastern Front. As the story opens the Jews of Berlin are being forced to wear a yellow star. Heydrich himself tells Bernie that he is going to start a new method of exterminating the Jews that is less stressful on the perpetrators than the firing squads that people like Kuttner commanded.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Heydrich mentions offhandedly that he is a fan of Hercule Poirot stories. This turns out to be crucial to the mystery, as Heydrich got the idea for how to commit the murder from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
- Bernie finds a sock with a hole in it, in Heydrich's waste paper basket. The hole in the sock was made by the bullets that killed Kuttner.
- Arianne says that she once worked for a Berlin railway company. She planted the bomb in the train station that failed to kill Heinrich Himmler.
- Chekhov's Skill: Arianne mentions that she studied to be a chemist. That gave her the knowledge of how to prime the bomb that was to kill Himmler.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: The footman says he knows Heydrich was upset after finding Kuttner because Heydrich was smoking in the morning, something Heydrich almost never does.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Arianne is brutally tortured, until she finally confesses to being part of UVOD, to having planted the bomb that failed to kill Himmler that spring, and to have plotted to kill Heydrich in Prague.
- Continuity Nod:
- Bernie idly thinks about how Heydrich had handed him special tasks "at least twice before." Those were the novels March Violets and The Pale Criminal.
- Heydrich recalls a conversation that he and Bernie had in Paris right after the French surrender. That was in Field Grey.
- Femme Fatale: Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Arianne Tauber was not a part-time hooker caught up in events. She is an anti-Nazi actively spying on behalf of the Czechs, and she becomes Bernie's lover and gets him to take her to Prague so she can contact the Czech resistance. She also conspired to have her partners kill Bernie before they stormed the castle and killed as many people at Heydrich's headquarters as they could.
- Final Solution: Going on in the East, as Germany is busy shooting to death hundreds of thousands of Jews, and Heydrich is working on a less messy way to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Bernie feels absurd investigating individual murders when murder on an industrial scale is happening in the Soviet Union.Bernie: I’ve been thinking that there must be a God because, after all, the Leader is always mentioning Him and it’s inconceivable he could be wrong about that. But what we’ve done to the Jews, and what we’re still doing to the Jews, and, I think, what we seem intent on doing to the Jews for a good while longer, well, He’s not going to forgive that in a hurry. Perhaps not ever. In fact, I’ve a very terrible feeling that whatever we do to them, He’s going to do to us. Only it’ll be worse. Much worse. It’ll be much worse because He’s going to get the fucking Russians to do it.
- Forced to Watch: Heydrich has Bernie chained to a radiator and forced to watch the torture of Arianne Tauber.
- Historical Domain Character: Most of the Bernie Gunthers have historical domain characters but this one, in which Bernie is embedded at Reinhard Heydrich's headquarters, has more than most. Heydrich, Konrad Heinlein, Karl Hermann Frank...practically every named character around Heydrich is a Historical Domain Character except for Kuttner, the guy who gets killed.
- Hope Spot: When at the novel's end, Bernie asks about Arianne's fate, he's informed she's been sent to a concentration camp. Bernie remarks people have survived incarceration in the camps until his friend mentions the name of the one she's been sent to... Auschwitz.
- How We Got Here: The novel starts out with a prologue set in June 1942, in which Bernie and Reinhard Heydrich arrive in Berlin on the same train, the difference being that Heydrich is dead. Bernie's pretty happy about that. The story then jumps back nine months to September 1941.
- Inelegant Blubbering: Konrad Henlein bursts into tears after Bernie reveals that not only does Henlein keep a mistress in a Prague hotel, his mistress is a Jew.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: When Heydrich carelessly comments about how Kuttner was actually shot twice, Bernie, who had kept that secret, has a "Eureka!" Moment and realizes that Heydrich did it.
- In the Style of: This novel, and specifically the murder of Captain Kuttner, is an Agatha Christie-style Locked Room Mystery, only with a much, much darker tone.
- It Will Never Catch On: Arianne is from Dresden. She says it's much safer than Berlin and there's never been an air raid. Much of Dresden was wiped out in the most notorious air raid of the war in February 1945.
- Just Following Orders: A common German excuse. Kuttner, who can't sleep and is deeply guilt-ridden over what he did in the East, says "It's an odd state of affairs, don't you think, when a man feels guilty for just doing his duty and obeying orders?"
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Bernie cheerfully says "I solve this kind of case all the time. Usually in the penultimate chapter. I like to keep the last few pages for restoring some sort of normality to the world." That's what happens in the Bernie Gunther novels, and it happens in this one, except that normality isn't really restored as the unspeakable evil of the Nazis and the Holocaust goes on.
- Locked Room Mystery: Captain Kuttner is found shot to death in a room with a locked door and a locked window. Bernie considers that the killer may have hidden in the floorboards, but eventually realizes that the solution is that Kuttner wasn't really dead, only drugged. Heydrich killed him after everyone else cleared out of the room.
- Lonely Funeral: After everything is done in Prague and Bernie is back in Berlin, he arranges for the funeral of the Dutch guest worker. The only people there are Bernie and one of his friends from the Gestapo.
- The Lost Lenore: Bernie has had his lovers, but he has kept the clothes of his dead wife for 20 years. He still sometimes pulls them out and smells them. Finally he gives them away to a pair of Jewish women in his building.
- La Résistance: The "Three Kings", a Czech resistance group active in Berlin. Earlier in 1941 they attempted to assassinate Himmler.
- The Mole: Heydrich is convinced that there is a mole—"Traitor X"—who is sending intelligence info to the Czechs and thence to Britain. He's right, as Bernie's interrogation of Major Thummel of the Abwehr reveals him to be the spy, who has been sending intel to the British since 1936.
- Never Suicide: It doesn't take Bernie long at the scene of Ernst Udet's "suicide" for Bernie to figure out that Udet was murdered, probably at the orders of Hermann Goering. For starters, the gun is in Udet's right hand when Udet was a lefty.
- Place Worse Than Death: Arianne's fate is to be shipped off to the newly completed Auschwitz.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The Nazis are wont to describe the mass murder of the Jews of Europe with a blizzard of obscure jargon instead of in plain, direct terms. As Bernie listens to Von Eberstein do just this, he thinks, "It was typical of the Nazis that they should call a spade an agrarian implement, and as I listened to one weasel word after another, I felt I wanted to slap him."note
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Both Bernie and Captain Kuttner after the war crimes they saw and perpetrated on the Eastern Front. Bernie cleans his gun every night and thinks about suicide, and has terrible nightmares, while Kuttner needs Veronal to sleep and always locks his door.
- Shout-Out:
- After what he saw on the Eastern Front, Bernie is having nightmares, which he thinks would be unsuitable even for Conrad Veidt or Max Schreck. (The stars, respectively, of German horror films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu.)
- Bernie remembers seeing The Golem a long time ago, and thinks that Germany would deserve it if the Golem emerged and took revenge.
- Heydrich talks about how he likes Agatha Christie books. It turns out that he was inspired to commit the murder by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
- Slow Clap: "Heydrich clapped his hands three times" after Bernie confronts him with the truth: that Heydrich killed Kuttner himself, but brought Bernie to the castle to investigate the murder, not to tab someone for the Kuttner murder, but in hopes of ferreting out The Mole.
- Spy Fiction: Stale Beer flavor. There's a mole in the SS sending intelligence to the British, and Reinhard Heydrich is determined to find him out.
- They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Bernie watches Heydrich and Karl Hermann Frank, in civilian clothes, in the audience at a circus, and can't get over how they look "just like everyone else", when of course Bernie knows they are brutal, vicious murderers.
- Trust Password: Arianne claims that she was supposed to know the man she was handing the envelope to when he whistled a certain tune, and she was to ask him if his name was Paul.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Nazi establishment classifies the Three Kings, and UVOD the Czech resistance group, as terrorists.
