Berlin, 1923. A defeated capital of a devastated nation. A city roiling with revolution and economic unrest. And stalked by a savage murderer. Dubbed 'Alpine Joe" by the police, he is killing the lower-class denizens of the Wedding District-whores, pimps, the elderly, the homeless. Equally adept with a gun or a knife, Alpine Joe is terrorizing the city with his vicious one-man crime spree. The man selected to stop him is Inspector Ernst Lohmann, a dedicated and humane policeman still fighting his own demons from the memories of the trenches of the Great War. "The Berlin Murder Squad" is the story of these two men and the story of a new age in history, populated with new criminals, new ideologies-and new monsters.

In his final book, New York Times bestselling author Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero's origins, exploring Bernie Gunther's first weeks on Berlin's Murder Squad. Summer, 1928. Berlin, a city where nothing is verboten. In the night streets, political gangs wander, looking for fights. Daylight reveals a beleaguered populace barely recovering from the postwar inflation, often jobless, reeling from the reparations imposed by the victors. At central police HQ, the Murder Commission has its hands full. A killer is on the loose, and though he scatters many clues, each is a dead end. It's almost as if he is taunting the cops. Meanwhile, the press is having a field day. This is what Bernie Gunther finds on his first day with the Murder Commisson. He's been taken on beacuse the people at the top have noticed him--they think he has the makings of a first-rate detective. But not just yet. Right now, he has to listen and learn. Metropolis is a tour of a city in chaos: of its seedy sideshows and sex clubs, of the underground gangs that run its rackets, and its bewildered citizens--the lost, the homeless, the abandoned. It is Berlin as it edges toward the new world order that Hitler will soo usher in. And Bernie? He's a quick study and he's learning a lot. Including, to his chagrin, that when push comes to shove, he isn't much better than the gangsters in doing whatever her must to get what he wants.

Based on a horrifying true story of one of the Holocaust's worst Nazi war criminals, this novel combines a police procedural, a courtroom thriller, and a fast-paced war-time narrative. In wartime Berlin the brilliant, idealistic young detective Georg Heuser joins the Murder Squad in the midst of the biggest manhunt the city has ever seen. A killer is slaughtering women on S-Bahn trains and leaving their battered bodies by the tracks. Heuser must confront evil eye-to-eye to track down the murderer. Soon after the case is solved, with the winds of world war stirring, Heuser is promoted by the SS and ultimately sent off to oversee the systematic murder of tens of thousands of Jews in the conquered region to the east the Nazis call Ostland. Nearly twenty years after the end of the war Heuser thinks his diabolical past has been forgotten, but an enterprising young lawyer, Paula Siebert, searching through Soviet archives, discovers evidence of Heuser's wartime crimes. Tried in the early 1960s along with other ex-Nazi officers as a war criminal, the wily Heuser deploys his training as a lawyer and years as a police detective to try and distance himself from his co-conspirators and thereby escape justice.

"Brilliant.” —Washington Post "The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement “The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served. . . . The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving “voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.” —Denver Post There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.

Former detective and reluctant SS officer Bernie Gunther must infiltrate a brutal world of spies, partisan terrorists, and high-level traitors in this “clever and compelling”(The Daily Beast) New York Times bestseller from Philip Kerr. Berlin, 1941. Bernie is back from the Eastern Front, once again working homicide in Berlin's Kripo and answering to Reinhard Heydrich, a man he both detests and fears. Heydrich has been newly named Reichsprotector of Czechoslovakia. Tipped off that there is an assassin in his midst, he orders Bernie to join him at his country estate outside Prague, where he has invited some of the Third Reich's most odious officials to celebrate his new appointment. One of them is the would-be assassin. Bernie can think of better ways to spend a beautiful autumn weekend, but, as he says, “You don't say no to Heydrich and live.”

When Commandant Michel de Palma follows an anonymous tip-off to a gated mansion by the coast, he finds a body whose face is obscured by a fearsome tribal mask, beneath it a mysterious wound that could not have been caused by a bullet. Surrounded by scores of masks and painted skulls, de Palma hears the haunting strains of a primal flute from the floors above. With few leads to go on, de Palma delves into an account of the murdered doctor's voyage to Papua New Guinea seventy years earlier, accompanied by a fellow amasser of Oceanic art, Robert Ballancourt. As the doctor's attractive but distant granddaughter offers de Palma further insights into her grandfather's second life as an intrepid collector, he and his team stumble upon an art-smuggling ring working out of Marseilles' dilapidated docks. But when his chief suspect is found dead, killed by the same method as Dr. Delorme, even de Palma begins to wonder whether the bodies on his hands are the victims of spirits intent on revenge. The rituals of Papuan warriors and headhunters-whose traditional way of life endured until deep into the twentieth century-form the intriguing backdrop to The Voice of the Spirits, another subtle yet satisfying novel from one of France's most original and thought-provoking crime writers.

On 14 January 1930, Horst Wessel, a young and ambitious member of the SA was shot at close range at his home in Berlin. Although the crime was never completely solved, the murder was most likely committed by a group of communists with close ties to the city's gangland. Wessel later died from his injuries. Joseph Goebbels, whose attention had already been drawn to Wessel as a possible future Nazi leader, was the first to recognize the propaganda potential of the case. 'A young martyr for the Third Reich' he wrote in his diary on 23 February 1930 immediately after receiving the news of Wessel's death. This was the beginning of the myth-making that transformed an ordinary individual into a masculine role model for an entire generation. Two months later, thousands of people lined the streets for Wessel's funeral parade and Goebbels delivered a graveside eulogy. In the years that followed - and as Nazi power increased - Horst Wessel became the hero of the Nazi movement - with his elaborate memorial quickly becoming a site of pilgrimage. The song Die Fahne Hoch for which Wessel had written the lyrics (and which subsequently became popularly known as the Horst Wessel Song) became the official Nazi party anthem and the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, where Wessel was murdered was renamed Horst-Wessel-Stadt in his honour. Numerous biographies and films followed. Using previously unseen material, Daniel Siemens provides a fascinating and gripping account of the background to Horst Wessel's murder and uncovers how and why the Nazis made him a political hero. He examines the Horst Wessel 'cult' which emerged in the aftermath of Wessel's death and the murders of revenge, particularly against Communists, committed by the SA and Gestapo after 1933. At the same time, the story of Horst Wessel provides a portrait of the Nazi propaganda machine at its most effective and most chilling.