Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, published in the early nineties, introduced Bernie Gunther, a former detective in the Berlin criminal police (KRIPO). He and the Nazis didn’t see eye to eye: ‘Don’t get me wrong. I just love Nazis … ninety-nine percent of Nazis are giving the other point one percent a bad reputation.’ The initial trilogy ended just after the war; If the Dead Rise Not begins in 1934, when Germany was lobbying for the 1936 Olympics.

Bernie has left KRIPO and is working as house detective at the exclusive Adlon Hotel. A suspicious death and a glamorous Jewish American journalist suck Bernie into a web of intrigue that ends 20 years later in Batista’s corrupt and sleazy Cuba. Worn down by the disaster wrought upon his country by Hitler and his band of thugs, Gunther has come close to compromising everything he once believed in. In Cuba, he is forced to choose between the corruption and criminality of Batista and the rigid ideology of Castro’s movement.

All Kerr’s books are wonderful and dangerous – read one and you’ll have to read them all.