If the dead rise not

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

The novel alternates between 1934 Berlin — where Bernie Gunther is working at a hotel as the Night of the Long Knives approaches and an American organized crime figure is trying to corner the construction contracts for the 1936 Olympics — and 1954 Havana, where Gunther encounters some of the same people twenty years later, now operating under different names. Philip Kerr's sixth Bernie Gunther novel is one of his most structurally satisfying, the two timelines intersecting in ways that illuminate both, and the specific lawlessness of pre-revolutionary Cuba mirrors the lawlessness of pre-war Berlin.