Philip Kerr (collection)

Tywin Lannister

Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton
In 1696, Christopher Ellis, a young, hot-tempered gentleman, is sent to the Tower of London, but not as a prisoner. A sudden twist of fate has led him there to assist the renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who as Warden of the Royal Mint has accepted an appointment to hunt down counterfeiters who threaten to topple the shaky, war-weakened economy. Armed with Newton’s superior intellect and Ellis’s skill with a sword, the new partners seem primed to solve the case. But when their investigation leads them to a mysterious coded message on a corpse hidden in the Lion Tower, they realize that something more sinister is afoot. In the heat of their pursuit, Newton and Ellis’s suspicions become all too real as the body count rises and the duo uncovers a menacing far-reaching plot that might lead to the collapse of the government—and cost them their very lives. An extraordinary, suspense-filled, and richly satisfying tale, Dark Matter is an engrossing mystery infused with the volatile mix of politics, science, and religion that characterized life in seventeenth-century London.

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Here Are Few Additions By The Author.

Author: Philip Kerr was a British author. He was best known for his Bernie Gunther series of 13 historical thrillers and a children's series, Children of the Lamp, under the name

P.B. Kerr

.

Bernie Gunther series:

• Metropolis (Missing)
  
• March Violets
  
• Pale Criminal
  
• A German Requiem
  
• The One from the Other
  
• A Quiet Flame
  
• If the Dead Rise Not
  
• Field Grey
  
• Prague Fatale
  
• A Man Without Breath
  
• The Lady from Zagreb
  
• The Other Side of Silence
  
• Prussian Blue
  
• Greeks Bearing Gifts
  

Scott Mason series:

• January Window
• Hand of God
• False Nine
  

Novels:

• A Five-Year Plan
• A Philosophical Investigation
• Dark Matter (In The Thread)
• Dead Meat
• Esau
• Gridiron
• Hand Of God
• Hitler's Peace
• Prayer
• Research
• The Most Frightening Story Ever Told
• The Second Angel
• The Shot
• The Winter Horses
  

Bernhard Gunther, a hard-boiled Berlin detective who specializes in tracking down missing persons—mostly Jews. He is summoned by a wealthy industrialist to find the murderer of his daughter and son-in-law, killed during the robbery of a priceless diamond necklace.

Gunther quickly is catapulted into a major political scandal involving Hitler's two main henchmen, Goering and Himmler. The search for clues takes Gunther to morgues overflowing with Nazi victims; raucous nightclubs; the Olympic games where Jesse Owens tramples the theory of Aryan racial superiority; the boudoir of a famous actress; and finally to the Dachau concentration camp. Fights with Gestapo agents, shoot-outs with adulterers, run-ins with a variety of criminals, and dead bodies in unexpected places

In the sweltering summer heat wave of 1938, the German people anxiously await the outcome of the Munich conference, wondering whether Hitler will plunge Europe into another war. Meanwhile, private investigator Bernie Gunther has taken on two cases involving blackmail. The first victim is a rich widow. The second is Bernie himself.

Having been caught framing an innocent Jew for a series of vicious murders, the Kripo—the Berlin criminal police—are intent on locating the real killer and aren't above blackmailing their former colleague to get the job done. Temporarily promoted to the rank of Kommissar, Bernie sets out to solve the dual mysteries and begins an investigation that will expose him to the darkest depths of humanity...

In A German Requiem, the private eye has survived the collapse of the Third Reich to find himself in Vienna. Amid decaying imperial splendor, he traces concentric circles of evil and uncovers a legacy that makes the wartime atrocities seem lily-white in comparison.

• The Winter Horses
  
  

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It is 1949 and—after being forced to serve in the SS in the killing fields of Ukraine—Bernie has moved to Munich to reestablish himself as a private investigator. When the beautiful Frau Britta Warzok hires him for an apparently simple job, Bernie’s suspicions flare but the money is too good to turn down. Soon, Bernie is on the run, because in a defeated and divided Germany, it’s hard to know friends from enemies, the one from the other.







A Quiet Flame opens in 1950. Falsely fingered a war criminal, Bernie Gunther has booked passage to Buenos Aires, lured, like the Nazis whose company he has always despised, by promises of a new life and a clean passport from the Per?n government. But Bernie doesn't have the luxury of settling into his new home and lying low. He is soon pressured by the local police into taking on a case in which a girl has turned up dead, gruesomely mutilated, and another--the daughter of a wealthy German banker--has gone missing. Both crimes seem to connect to an unsolved case Bernie worked on back in Berlin in 1932. It's not so far-fetched that the cases might be linked: after all, the scum of the earth has been washing up on Argentine shores--state-licensed murderers and torturers--so why couldn't a serial killer be among them?

But Argentina, just like Germany, holds terrible secrets within its corrupt halls of power. When beautiful Anna Yagubsky seeks Gunther out, desperate for help, to find out what happened to her Jewish aunt and uncle who have disappeared, he is drawn into a horror story that rivals everything he has tried so hard to leave behind half a world away.







Berlin, 1934: The Nazis have secured the 1936 Olympiad for the city but are facing foreign resistance. Hitler and Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, have connived to soft-pedal Nazi anti- Semitism and convince America to participate. Bernie Gunther, now the house detective at an upscale Berlin hotel, is swept into this world of international corruption and dangerous double-dealing, caught between the warring factions of the Nazi apparatus. Havana, 1954: Batista, aided by the CIA, has just seized power; Castro is in prison; and the American Mafia is quickly gaining a stranglehold on the city's exploding gaming and prostitution industries. Bernie, who has been unceremoniously kicked out of Buenos Aires, has resurfaced in Cuba with a new life, seemingly one of routine and relative peace. But Bernie discovers that he truly cannot outrun the burden of his past: He soon collides with a vicious killer from his Berlin days, who is mysteriously murdered not long afterward-and an old lover, who may be the murderer.

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During his eleven years working homicide in Berlin's Kripo, Bernie Gunther learned a thing or two about evil. Then he set himself up as a private detective—until 1940 when Heydrich dragooned him into the SS's field gray uniform and the bloodbath that was the Eastern Front. Spanning twenty-five tumultuous years,

Field Gray

strides across the killing fields of Europe, landing Bernie in a divided Germany at the height of the Cold War—revealing a treacherous world where the ends justify the means and no one can be trusted...

September 1941. Bernie Gunther returns from the horrors of the Eastern Front to find his home city of Berlin changed, and changed for the worse. Now back at his old desk on Homicide in Kripo HQ, Alexanderplatz, Bernie starts to investigate the death of a Dutch railway worker, while starting something - of an entirely different nature - with a local good-time girl.

But he is obliged to drop everything when his old boss, Reinhard Heydrich of the SD, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, orders him to Prague to spend a weekend at his country house. It's an invitation Bernie feels he would gladly have been spared, especially when he meets his fellow guests - all of them senior loathsome figures in the SS and SD.

The weekend turns sour almost immediately when a body is found, in a room that was locked from the inside. Now the spotlight falls on Bernie to show off his investigative skills and solve this seemingly impossible mystery. If he fails to do so, he knows what is at stake - not only his reputation, but also that of Reinhard Heydrich, a man who does not like to lose face.

Berlin, March, 1943. A month has passed since the stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Though Hitler insists Germany is winning the war, commanders on the ground know better. Morale is low, discipline at risk. Now word has reached Berlin of a Red massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. If true, the message it would send to the troops is clear: Fight on or risk certain death. For once, both the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Goebbels want the same thing: irrefutable evidence of this Russian atrocity. To the Wehrmacht, such proof will soften the reality of its own war crimes in the eyes of the victors. For Goebbels, such proof could turn the tide of war by destroying the Alliance, cutting Russia off from its western supply lines.

Both parties agree that the ensuing investigation must be overseen by a professional trained in sifting evidence and interrogating witnesses. Anything that smells of incompetence or tampering will defeat their purposes. And so Bernie Gunther is dispatched to Smolensk, where truth is as much a victim of war as those poor dead Polish officers.

Smolensk, March, 1943. Army Group Center is an enclave of Prussian aristocrats who have owned the Wehrmacht almost as long as they’ve owned their baronial estates, an officer class whose families have been intermarrying for generations. The wisecracking, rough-edged Gunther is not a good fit. He is, after all, a Berlin bull. But he has a far bigger concern than sharp elbows and supercilious stares, for somewhere in this mix is a cunning and savage killer who has left a trail of bloody victims.

This is no psycho case. This is a man with motive enough to kill and skills enough to leave no trace of himself. Bad luck that in this war zone, such skills are two-a-penny. Somehow Bernie must put a face to this killer before he puts an end to Bernie.

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A beautiful actress, a rising star of the giant German film company UFA, now controlled by the Propaganda Ministry. The very clever, very dangerous Propaganda Minister—close confidant of Hitler, an ambitious schemer and flagrant libertine. And Bernie Gunther, former Berlin homicide bull, now forced to do favors for Joseph Goebbels at the Propaganda Minister’s command.

This time, the favor is personal. And this time, nothing is what it seems.

Set down amid the killing fields of Ustashe-controlled Croatia, Bernie finds himself in a world of mindless brutality where everyone has a hidden agenda. Perfect territory for a true cynic whose instinct is to trust no one.

Once I’d been a good detective in Kripo, but that was a while ago, before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent.” Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

The war is over. Bernie Gunther, our sardonic former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer, is now living on the French Riviera. It is 1956 and Bernie is the go-to guy at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, the man you turn to for touring tips or if you need a fourth for bridge. As it happens, a local writer needs just that, someone to fill the fourth seat in a regular game that is the usual evening diversion at the Villa Mauresque. Not just any writer. Perhaps the richest and most famous living writer in the world: W. Somerset Maugham. And it turns out it is not just a bridge partner that he needs; it’s some professional advice. Maugham is being blackmailed—perhaps because of his unorthodox lifestyle. Or perhaps because of something in his past, because once upon a time, Maugham worked for the British secret service, and the people now blackmailing him are spies.

As Gunther fans know, all roads lead back to the viper’s nest that was Hitler’s Third Reich and to the killing fields that spread like a disease across Europe. Even in 1956, peace has not come to the continent: now the Soviets have the H-bomb and spies from every major power feel free to make all of Europe their personal playground.

The French Riviera, 1956: The invitation to dinner was not unexpected, though neither was it welcome. Ernst Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, has turned up in Nice, and he’s not on holiday. An old and dangerous adversary, Mielke is calling in a debt. He intends that Bernie go to London and, with the vial of Thallium he now pushes across the table, poison a female agent they both have had dealings with.

But chance intervenes in the form of Friedrich Korsch, an old Kripo comrade now working for Stasi and probably there to make sure Bernie gets the job done. Bernie bolts for the German border. Traveling by night, holed up during the day, Bernie has plenty of down time to recall the last time Korsch and he worked together.

It was the summer of 1939: At Hitler’s mountaintop retreat in Obersalzberg, the body of a low-level bureaucrat has been found murdered. Bernie and Korsch are selected to run the case. They have one week to solve the murder—Hitler is due back then to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Lucky Bernie: it’s his reward for being Kripo’s best homicide detective. He knows what a box he’s in: millions have been spent to secure Obersalzberg. It would be a disaster if Hitler were to discover a shocking murder had been committed on the terrace of his own home. But the mountaintop is home to an elite Nazi community. It would be an even bigger disaster for Bernie if one of them was the murderer.

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1957, Munich. Bernie Gunther's latest move in a long string of varied careers sees him working for an insurance company. It makes a kind of sense: both cops and insurance companies have a vested interest in figuring out when people are lying to them, and Bernie has a lifetime of experience to call on.

Sent to Athens to investigate a claim from a fellow German for a ship that has sunk, Bernie takes an instant dislike to the claimant. When he discovers the ship in question once belonged to a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz, he is convinced the sinking was no accident but an avenging arson attack. Then the claimant is found dead, shot through both eyes. It's a win for Bernie's employers at least: no one to pay out to even if the claim is genuine. But who is behind the murder, and why?

Strong-armed into helping the Greek police with their investigation, Bernie is once again drawn inexorably back to the dark history of the Second World War, and the deportation of the Jews of Salonika - now Thessaloniki. As Europe seems ready to move on to a more united future with Germany as a partner rather than an enemy, at least one person in Greece is ready neither to forgive nor forget. And, deep down, Bernie thinks they may have a point.

Scott Mason series:

Everyone knows football is a matter of life and death.
But this time, it's murder.

Scott Manson is team coach for London City football club. He's also their all-round fixer - he gets the lads in to training, and out of trouble, keeps the wags at bay and the press in his pocket. The players love him, the bosses trust him.

But now London City manager Joao Zarco is dead, killed at his team's beloved stadium at Silvertown Docks. Even Scott Manson can't smooth over murder... but can he catch the killer before he strikes again?

In Athens, where London City is set to play Olympiacos in the Champion's League, the temperature is high, and tempers even higher. Greece is rioting and manager Scott Manson is keeping his team on a tight leash. There must be no drinking, no nightlife and no women. After the game, they are to get back to London refreshed and ready for a crucial match at home stadium Silvertown Docks.

But Scott didn't plan for death on the pitch. When City's star striker collapses mid-match, it shocks the nation. Is it a heart attack? Or something more sinister? As the Greek authorities mount a murder investigation, Scott Manson must find the truth - and fast - to get his team home in time.

Scott Manson needs to leave London. His job managing London City football team is over, and it cuts deep to watch them play on without him.

But changing your life isn't as simple as all that. When Scott takes up a new position in Shanghai, he gets caught up in an elaborate sting mounted by a rival team. And when he quits that for a job in Barcelona, it turns out his new employers only want him for his detective skills: their star player is missing, and they need to find him fast.

As Scott tracks the player from Paris to Antigua, he uncovers corruption, kidnapping - and murder...

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Novels:



Dave Delano didn't spend five years in a Florida prison idling away hard time. "I believe in the redistribution of wealth, " he told one of his guards. But redistribution for Dave was a strictly personal matter. His five-year plan aimed to put millions into his own pockets. In the former Soviet Union there are a million scams. Most lucrative is money laundering. Refitting U.S. yachts to hide dirty dollars and transshipping them across the Atlantic on huge transport ferries destined for the Europoean playground of the international rich, the mob magically "disappears" the cash, moving it through Black Sea ports and into Russian banks. Dave Delano thinks some of that money should be his. It's a simple matter of hijacking one of those yacht ferries on the high seas. For the Columbian cartel, Europe is a magnet. But landing their cocaine is another matter. When FBI agent Kate Fury gets a hot tip they are shipping it in a hollowed-out yacht hull via transport ferry, she know's she's onto the biggest collar of her career. Boarding that ferry, she's set to pounce. But she hasn't counted on Dave Delano, who has his own personal agenda. The result is pure combustion:

London 2013: a world in which serial murder has reached epidemic proportions. Tested positively by the government as one disposed to criminal violence, Jake Jacowicz breaks into the computer to erase his name, where he discovers a list of others so accused and hits on a horrifying idea: what if he were to become a killer of serial killers?

Set in Leningrad in 1993, this book features a hard-bitten detective called Grushko. The background is the chaos that follows the collapse of the old order - the growing black market, the mafia and the neo-Nazi factions. When a journalist is murdered, Grushko investigates.

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In an ice cave high on a forbidden Himalayan mountaintop, renegade climber Jack Furness unearths a perfectly preserved skull, a fossil that may be the missing link and the scientific discovery of the century. To Berkeley paleoanthropologist Stella Swift, the miraculous find warrants an immediate expedition up the mountain's treacherous Fish Tail Peak. But with neighboring Pakistan and India on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, the Pentagon and the GA have their own designs on the remote site. Now, they're all about to enter a domain where one of nature's fiercest creations has thrived for millions of years -- and modern man was never meant to be.







Los Angeles, 1988 Ray Richardson, a brilliant architechnologist, has created a dazzling new building: 'The Gridiron', in the heart of L. A. The Gridiron represents the state-of-the-art in smart buildings: every aspect of the building, from temperature control to security, is controlled by an intricate computer system. On the eve of the building's official opening, a team gathers to put the finishing touches to Ray's new masterpiece. But there are a couple of unexplained deaths, which the team at first puts down to saboteurs. It is only when they discover how bizarre these deaths are that they realise the building - through its computer - is controlling them, and is set to destroy its creators.

Autumn 1943. Since Stalingrad, Hitler has known that Germany cannot win the war. The upcoming Allied conference in Teheran will set the ground rules for their second front-and for the peace to come. Realizing that the unconditional surrender FDR has demanded will leave Germany in ruins, Hitler has put out peace feelers. (Unbeknownst to him, so has Himmler, who is ready to stage a coup in order to reach an accord.) FDR and Stalin are willing to negotiate. Only Churchill refuses to listen.

At the center of this high-stakes game of deals and doubledealing is Willard Mayer, an OSS operative who has been chosen by FDR to serve as his envoy. He is the perfect foil for the steamy world of deception, betrayals, and assassinations that make up the moral universe of realpolitik. A cool, self-absorbed, emotionally distant womanizer with a questionable past, Mayer has embraced the stylish philosophy of the day, in which no values are fixed. In the course of the novel, his beliefs will be put to the ultimate test.

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Gil Martins, an agent with the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Unit in Houston, confronts the violence generated by extremism within our nation’s borders every day. He sees hatred and destruction wrought by every kind of “ism” there is, and the zealots who kill in their names. Until now, he has always been a part of the solution—however imperfect—a part of justice. But when Gil discovers he played a key role in wrongly condemning an innocent man to death row, it shakes his faith—in the system, in himself, and in God—deeply. It even estranges him from his wife and son.  

Desperate, Gil offers up a prayer. To know God is there, not through a sign or physical demonstration but through the strength to cope with his ever-growing, ever-creeping doubts.

His problems become more than personal as things heat up in Houston. A serial killer terrorizing the morally righteous turns out to have religious motivations, upping the case from homicide to domestic terrorism. A number of prominent secular icons die or are grievously injured abruptly and under suspicious circumstances, the latest of which is a New Atheist writer who’s fallen into an inexplicable coma. Left and right, it seems Gil can’t escape the power of God and murder.

As Gil investigates both cases, he realizes that there may be a connection—answering his prayers in a most terrifying way.

Houston is the richest writer in the world, a book factory publishing many bestsellers a year - so many that he can't possibly write them himself. He has a team that feeds off his talent; ghost writers, agents, publishers. So when he decides to take a year out to write something of quality, a novel that will win prizes and critical acclaim, a lot of people stand to lose their livelihoods.


Now Houston, the prime suspect in his wife's murder, has disappeared. He owns a boat and has a pilot's licence - he could be anywhere and there are many who'd like to find him.


First there's the police. If he's innocent, why did he flee? Then again, maybe he was set up by one of his enemies.








Billy Shivers doesn't have a lot of excitement in his life. He prefers to spend his days reading alone in the Hitchcock Public Library. So it is a bit out of character when he finds himself drawn to the Haunted House of Books, and a competition daring readers to survive an entire night inside.

The Haunted House of Books is a cross between a bookstore and a booby trap. It's a creeky old mansion full of dark hallways and things that go bump in the night, and the store's ill-tempered owner, Mr. Rapscallion, only adds to the mystery.

But the frights of the store itself are nothing compared to the stories it holds. These stories are so ghastly, so terrifying, so shocking that once you've read them, you'll never be the same. Does Billy dare begin?

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Earth has been irrevocably altered by global climatic changes and a worldwide plague of P2 -- a slow-acting, insidious virus. The Moon, now populated by penal colonies and sex hotels, also protects mankind's most sought-after and vital commodity -- virus-free blood -- in the most impregnable high-security installation ever engineered.

The First National Blood Bank is the brainchild of security firm Terotech's chief designer, Dana Dallas. But after Dallas' P2-infected daughter is denied uncontaminated blood, he is considered a security risk -- and expendable. With his life on the line, and his family caught in the cross fire, Dallas swears revenge on the elitist system and his own creation. Enlisting an eclectic crew of rebels, he devises a daring plan to infiltrate the lunar fortress -- one that will jeopardize everyone involved, and hinges on a very strange and unforeseen ally.

The Communist. The Politician. The Hit Man. The Shot. Tom Jefferson has a job he does very well. He kills for a living. Fresh off the takedown of a Nazi in Buenos Aires, Tom is poised for his next "assignment" -- the assassination of Fidel Castro. The mob -- led by Sam Giancana -- the CIA, and presidential candidate Jack Kennedy are all in on the plan. Together, they can take Castro out of the picture, put Jack in office, and get Giancana back in the Cuban casino business. And JFK can't say no, because Giancana possesses some very incriminating tapes documenting the politician's sexual escapades. But just as Tom sets his sights on Cuba, he is suddenly exposed to some explosive information that alters his course. Now, the perfect hit is turning into the perfect nightmare for everyone involved, because the word is out: Cool killer Tom is no longer targeting Castro...he's gunning for Kennedy.







It will soon be another cold winter in the Ukraine. But it's 1941, and things are different this year. Max, the devoted caretaker of an animal preserve, must learn to live with the Nazis who have overtaken this precious land. He must also learn to keep secrets--for there is a girl, Kalinka, who is hiding in the park.

Kalinka has lost her home, her family, her belongings--everything but her life. Still, she has gained one small, precious gift: a relationship with the rare wild and wily Przewalski's horses that wander the preserve. Aside from Max, these endangered animals are her only friends--until a Nazi campaign of extermination nearly wipes them out for good.

Now Kalinka must set out on...





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