If you think that skinhead with a swastika tattoo at the mall is just some harmless dork "acting out," think again. Scottish author Philip Kerr's belated follow-up (two books in three years, after a 15-year gap) to the now-classic Berlin Noir trilogy finds Bernie Gunther, ex-cop, former Berlin private detective and (reluctant) SS officer, emigrating to Argentina under an assumed name, just another German fleeing justice post-WWII. That Bernie was never a Nazi is really what makes this series so compelling. His unflinching eyewitness account of the rise and fall of the Third Reich is disturbing and ugly--there's no spin here, no trying to play nice with the past. What saves this book from being an excursion into black-and-white finger pointing (or a cartoonish wallow like Jerry Stahl's recent Pain Killers) is that Bernie is no superman. He's all too recognizably human: alternately weak, horny, stupid, brave, honorable and cowardly, and prone to startling lapses in judgment--his running stream of wisecracks comes off as a sort of Chandleresque version of Tourette's Syndrome. It certainly does him no favors in Peron's Nazi-friendly Argentina, where his past catches up with him and is used to pressure him into investigating the rape and murder of a young girl whose mutilated corpse bears disturbing similarities to a case Bernie once worked on in prewar Berlin. Could a fellow German refugee be responsible? The prolonged flashbacks that intersperse this taut, masterfully plotted book serve as a sort of microcosm of the entire series, whipsawing the reader back and forth in time between the two cases, allowing readers to bear witness once more to the horrors of the regime and its aftermath--and to question the complicity and indifference of numerous other nations that allowed or even encouraged it to happen. Sharply drawn characters and an in-your-face history lesson make this one required reading.