num_pages: 416
description: Once Id been a good detective in Kripo but that was a while ago before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent. Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.The war is over. Bernie Gunther our sardonic former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer is now living on the French Riviera. It is 1956 and Bernie is the go-to guy at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat the man you turn to for touring tips or if you need a fourth for bridge. As it happens a local writer needs just that someone to fill the fourth seat in a regular game that is the usual evening diversion at the Villa Mauresque. Not just any writer. Perhaps the richest and most famous living writer in the world: W. Somerset Maugham. And it turns out it is not just a bridge partner that he needs; its some professional advice. Maugham is being blackmailedperhaps because of his unorthodox lifestyle. Or perhaps because of something in his past because once upon a time Maugham worked for the British secret service and the people now blackmailing him are spies.As Gunther fans know all roads lead back to the vipers nest that was Hitlers Third Reich and to the killing fields that spread like a disease across Europe. Even in 1956 peace has not come to the continent: now the Soviets have the H-bomb and spies from every major power feel free to make all of Europe their personal playground.
language: English
title: The Other Side of Silence
publisher: Marian Wood Books/Putnam