A QUIET FLAME: PHILIP KERR ***

A QUIET FLAME is the fifth Bernie Gunther novel I have read by Kerr, this one set in 1950 in Buenos Aires, where Bernie has gone to escape the label of Nazi SS.  And he ends up meeting some famous Nazis, who also happen to be living there, having escaped the noose of the Nuremberg Trials. He meets Peron, even his wife, and becomes entangled in both ex Nazi and Peronista politics, a bad combination.  Like other novels, he seems to figure out late in the book that he's being used by the Argentinians, as he searches for a missing girl, supposedly Evita's daughter by a former lover.  It leads to a ring of sex offenders, death camps for Jews in Argentina, whether that's true, I am not sure.  I should have looked it up.  And he falls in love with a woman, a Jewess, who helps him find the missing girl if, in his searches, he finds out what happened to her uncles.  Together, they travel to verboten territory, recognize what looks like the remains of a concentration camp, complete with furnaces and realize they are in trouble.  The authorities realize that both are now witnesses to atrocities committed by Argentina in the 1940's and are given a day to leave Argentina and never come back.  Bernie begs his Jewess to come with him but she remains behind, loyal to her aging father.  One of the more interesting Bernie Gunther reads because it's set in South America among a coterie of escaped Nazis, Adolph Eichmann among them.