The Lady from Zagreb

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A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.

Cynical Berlin cop Bernie Gunther who has, through a series of captivating novels, engineered his way through the pitfalls and abysses of Nazi-times Germany and the opening years of WW2, has not yet reached the end of his travails. It's 1942 and he has been tasked by his Nazi superiors, with whom he has little sympathy, to track down a famous film star, who has attracted the attention of Goebbels himself, to Switzerland, it initially feels like a straightforward break from everyday horrors.

Not so, of course. The elusive beauty had contacts with Croatian fascists and complications soon arise under his step, eventually bringing him back to Berlin, and to his own surprise, seeing him fall in love. Sardonic, hardboiled as leather, a voice of sanity in years of madness, Bernie as ever tries to remain an honest man in a dishonest world. A great addition to the series.

Reviewed by Maxim Jakubowski
Maxim Jakubowski is a London-based novelist and editor.
More reviews by Maxim Jakubowski

About The Lady from Zagreb

'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILDSummer 1942. When Bernie Gunther is ordered to speak at an international police conference, an old acquaintance has a favour to ask. Little does Bernie suspect what this simple surveillance task will provoke... One year later, resurfacing from the hell of the Eastern Front, a superior gives him another task that seems straightforward: locating the father of Dalia Dresner, the rising star of German cinema. Bernie accepts the job. Not that he has much choice - the superior is Goebbels himself. But Dresner's father hails from Yugoslavia, a country so riven by sectarian horrors that even Bernie's stomach is turned. Yet even with monsters at home and abroad, one thing alone drives him on from Berlin to Zagreb to Zurich: Bernie Gunther has fallen in love.

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