THE LADY FROM ZAGREB: PHILLP KERR

This time it's 1943, in Berlin to begin with, and Bernie has just returned from Prague, following the death of Frederic Heydrich, Bernie's master only to fall under the thrall of another evil genius, Joseph Goebbels.  Bernie is working at the Police Presidium, not sure what to do with his life.  He hates the fact that he is working for the Nazis but has no choice.  He gets a request from General Arthur Nebe, to speak at a conference in Berlin about his police work.  Joseph Goebbels hears him speak, likes what he says, learns that he's efficient, that he gets thing down and calls him into his office. Goebbels, a womanizer, has fallen for the film star, Dalia Dresner, and wants her to star in a movie he is helping to produce.  Unfortunately, she's married, living in Switzerland and seems to have no interest in either Goebbels or the film unless Goebbels helps her find her father, missing since childhood.

Enter Bernie, a fixer so to speak.  He has to jump a few hoops before he leaves, like getting married to save a girl friend from the Gestapo and driving a Genera's car to Switzerland.  The car just happen to have gold bars underneath its frame and a plan for the German invasion of Switzerland in the exhaust pipe. Needless to say, this gets Bernie in trouble in Switzerland.  Before traveling to Yugoslavia, however,  Bernie meets Dalia in Switzerland, and they fall for each other and have a brief affair before he attempts to find her father in Croatia.

This section of the novel allows Kerr, who often mixes facts with his fiction, the chance to talk about the Ustase, the militant Croatian version of the Gestapo.  They are responsible for murdering over a million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies during WW II.  Bernie discovers that Dalia's father, Father Ladislaus, a Franciscan priest, is Commandant of a Croatian prison camp and is responsible for many mass murders. Dalia's father was based on an actual Franciscan Father known as 'the devil of Jasenovac Prison' to the inmates, 'the Glorious One' to Croatian troops.

When Bernie returns to Berlin and shares his info with Goebbels, they both agree it is not something they should share with Dalia.  Nevertheless, she returns to Berlin, to star in the film.  Bernie finds out that her father has come to Berlin with a Croatian delegation, and Bernie, fearing for the worst, rushes to Dalia's apartment only to find the Priest lying on the floor, shot six times by Dalia.  It turns out the priest was not her father, but was responsible for liquidating her Serbian family, the shooting an act of revenge. When all this is discovered, Goebbels is upset with the way things have turned out and sends Bernie to the Eastern Front, near the Baltic Sea, to keep him out of the way. And Bernie never sees Dalia again except at the cinema.