In this, the tenth of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels, it's 1954 and Bernie is working as the concierge at the Grand Hotel on the French Riviera. He's happy to put his past behind him and is working under the name Walter Wolf. His only fun is to play bridge a couple of times a week with friends. This leads him to the Villa Mauaresque, to play bridge with the novelist W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham, however, has more than bridge on his mind. He's being black mailed and Bernie has been recommended to him as a man who might act as a good between. Because Bernie likes Maugham, he reluctantly accepts which begins the story. It's more than just blackmail; it involves a former Nazi antagonist of Bernie's, Harold Heinz Henning, an East German Stasi secret agent Anne French, whom Bernie unfortunately takes on as a lover, and various MI6's heads from London, who worry about the implications of the blackmail on their relations with the US.
The blackmail involves a photograph which might suggest that various higher ups in the British Intelligence might actually have been Russian spies and this is something the MI6 cannot afford made public. Like most of Bernie's novels, there are flashbacks to Nazi Germany, to the reasons why Bernie so dislikes Henning. The biggest reason is that Henning blackmailed Bernie in 1943, forcing him to send his pregnant and soon to be wife away from Germany, on the ship, Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship was sunk by Russian submarines, nine thousand and four hundred people drowned, many of them children, including Bernie's wife to be. Harold Heinz along with a few others survived. Thus, Bernie's hatred of the man. It gets complicated and a bit silly by the end when Bernie discovers that Anne French, his lover, was a Stasi agent, setting him up for a fall. He doesn't and, we assume, she does by the end. And Bernie uncharacteristically takes no pity on Henning. Who would.
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