A Man Without Breath, A Bernie Gunther Novel

New York: A Marian Wood Book/G. P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Group, 2013. First edition. Hardcover. Remainder mark on bottom edge, else fine copy/fine. 8vo. Two-tone boards. Pp. (x), 466, (iv).

Philip Kerr has written more than ten novels about his cynical, but very appealing, detective Bernie Gunther. They cover his various careers as a homicide inspector with the Berlin police, as a private detective, as head of security in a five-star hotel, and as a dogsbody for the likes of Reinhard Heydrich. This story concerns events in 1943 when under the orders of Joseph Goebbels he is sent to Smolensk to investigate the murder of over 4,000 Polish officers and NCOs three years previously by the Russian NKVD in the Katyn Forest. The background to this is that Stalin was determined to destroy Poland's potential as a nation, and so accordingly he approved Beria's plan to eliminate all Polish leaders, especially the officer corps of their army. Almost 22,000 victims were taken to and murdered at five sites, the most notorious being Katyn. In 1943 the mass graves were discovered, and revealed in a blaze of publicity, by the advancing German Army. In addition, over 60,000 relatives of those killed were deported to Central Asia, and for good measure 65,000 Jews who had fled the German advance but had refused Soviet citizenship.