A good, intriguing set of mysteries one set in Berlin before the 1936 Olympics and the other in pre-Castro Cuba. Manages to capture both eras well. Bernie Gunther is an entertaining companion through these mysteries. ( )

Bernie helps American Jewish journalist investigate corruption in Nazi Olympic bid but is thwarted. After the war they meet again in Cuba where the gangster who threatened the journalist is now courting her daughter. He offers Bernie a job in his hotel casino but is murdered before Bernie can start the job. The other gangsters fear a gang rivalry and hire Bernie to investigate. Meanwhile rebels threaten Bautista. When Bernie solves the case he hopes to leave Cuba for Germany but is retained by another threat from his past.

An extremely well-researched novel set mainly in 1934 Berlin and partly 1954 Havana. Bernie Gunther is an ex-cop and anti-Naxi working as head of security at the famous Adlon Hotel in Berlin. Investigating the death of a guest, he finds himself caught up in powerful groups trying to corrupt the contracts for the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Highly recommended. ( )

Un año después de abandonar la Kripo, la Policía Criminal alemana, Bernie Gunther trabaja en el Hotel Adlon, en donde se aloja la periodista norteamericana Noreen Charalambides, que ha llegado a Berlín para investigar el creciente fervor antijudío y la sospechosa designación de la ciudad como sede de los Juegos Olímpicos de 1936. Noreen y Gunther se aliarán dentro y fuera de la cama seguirle la pista a una trama que une las altas esferas del nazismo con el crimen organizado estadounidense. Un chantaje, doble y calculado, les hará renunciar a destapar la miseria y los asesinatos, pero no al amor.
Sin embargo, Noreen es obligada a volver a Estados Unidos, y Gunther ve cómo, otra vez, una mujer se pierde en las sombras. Hasta que veinte años después, ambos se reencuentran en la insurgente Habana de Batista. Pero los fantasmas nunca viajan solos.

"If the Dead Rise Not", the sixth novel in the Bernie Gunther series follows the pattern of his previous novels with a setting in Nazi Germany in 1934 with the plot resumed in Havana, Cuba in 1954 during the reign of Fulgencio Batista.

In 1934 Bernie has recently resigned from his position as a homicide investigator with the Berlin police department and taken a job as the house dick at the Hotel Adlon, the premier hotel in Berlin owned by Hedda and Louis Adlon. One of the recurring themes of the novel is the exchange of favors among the characters beginning with Bernie offering to help out a sometime Jewish lover, Frieda Bamburger, who wants to leave Berlin for Hamburg, harboring the illusion that she will be able to cover up her heritage by virtue of her marriage to a Gentile husband. Bernie, as it turns out, also needs a favor. He has a Jewish grandmother who needs to be "Aryanized". In return for all of these favors, Bernie is called upon to help the police investigate the drowning death of an individual who may have been murdered and who was employed as a laborer on one of the projects connected with the construction of the facilities for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

So the plot is a little slow to unwind, but soon takes off as Gunther gets enmeshed in various investigations related to the Olympic project and an effort to persuade the American Olympic Committee headed by Avery Brundage to boycott the games. There is corruption galore including the Gestapo but mainly centering around the activities of an American Jew, Max Reles, who is fluent in German and fluent in eliminating anyone who gets in the way of his making a boatload of dough via construction contracts for firms he owns. Reles has also been done a favor by Gunther who, as a favor to his hotel employers, has secured the services of a high class prostitute with secretarial skills to work for Reles who has lost his former Jewish secretary who has vamoosed to Danzig again with the help of Gunther.

The first part of the book culminates in a denouement aboard a boat in which Gunther and Reles face off with Max holding apparently holding all the cards and all the weapons. I will leave the details to the reader to discover the outcome.

The second part of the book does a fast forward to 1954 and Bernie's latest place of exile, Havana, having found Buenos Aires under the Peron regime a little too hot for his well being. He is using his Argentinian passport under the unlikely name of Carlos Hausner. Thanks to a deus ex machina in the person of his lover from 1934 Berlin, Noreen Charalambides (nee Eisner), popping up in Havana and living in Ernest Hemingway's home, Kerr picks up the threads from Part One and Gunther's one time nemesis Max Reles reappears, now in the hotels/gambling business and associated with organized crime figures, most prominently, Meyer Lansky. What ensues is right out of The Godfather II. As always, I won't spoil it for the reader by relating how all of this sorts itself out. I will say that Kerr does the near impossible by undoing all the tangled threads of this story and there is no shortage of action and tension in the telling. For Bernie Gunther fans "If the Dead Rise Not" rises to the occasion and for fans of detective stories cum historical fiction this is definitely a winner. ( )