"Field Grey", Philip Kerr

Field Grey
Philip Kerr, 2010
Quercus, ebook kindle

It is hard to say whether Bernie Gunther is a lucky man or not; he has survived the Nazi regime and the WWII, has left back the Perons' Argentina and the Cuba of Bastista, but he is never able to enjoy the quiet life he deserves. In this novel, we find Gunther trying to scape form Cuba to Santo Domingo, mainly because of his difficult relations with the Cuban secret services. What was going to be an easy sailing turns into a nightmare when the boat, in which Gunther was accompanied by a supposed whore that really was a communist activist, was intercepted by the US Navy. As a result of this interception, Gunther ends up in a North American jail and later on in the prison of Landsberg in Berlin, as an alleged Nazi criminal. However, the real aim of the American authorities that custody him is Erich Mielke, the chief of the DDR secret services. Gunther will have to remember his life during the war in France for his American captors, in the occupied Paris, and the period he remained in Russia as a POW. Obviously, Gunther will have to do something more than just talk about his memories, in order to leave his imprisonment.

 
In the seventh novel of the Bernie Gunther series, we get to know what happened to him during the WWII. He was in France trying to find a German communist, Erich Mielke, whose life he will save several times. We also discover Gunther's refusal of the orders that led the German army to exterminate the Jews in Ukraine, and how he ended up in a soviet POW camp after the fall of Koningsberg. However, in this book I think that the author has made an exercise of what I would call "filling the gaps". In my opinion, he has added another shackle to the chain, but he hasn't been carefully enough to avoid my sensation of that it was something forced. With that, I'm not saying that it is a boring reading, and in fact I have found it quite amusing, but I can not help the sensation I have just described. Furthermore, I have found it quite confusing, with all that going back and forth through Gunther's life. To justify that, you will have to keep in mind that the novel is located in 1954, with regressions to 1931, 1940, 1941 and 1947.

To sum up, Field Grey is an amusing and interesting novel in which be get a deeper knowledge about Bernie Gunther and the WWII, but is also a book that is a little bit confusing that gives the impressions that was written first of all to fill a gap, to be another shackle of the series. In my opinion, it is the worst novel of the seven.