A Man Without Breath, Kerr- B-

                                         This is the twelfth book in a series about Bernie Gunther, a Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) detective in Berlin.  Gunther is a standard modern detective - very skilled, a bit cynical and very witty.  Kerr is quite good at historical background and depicting a real sense of time and place.  The magic here is that the setting  is Weimar Germany.  Gunther quits the police in 1933 and acts as a private detective in the Nazi era, but finds himself in uniform when the war starts.  In all of the previous books that I've  read, the big picture is part of the background.  Unfortunately, here Gunther is an actor in a historical event, and I'm afraid this book is just not as good as its predecessors.  Gunther works for the Wehrmacht as an inspector in the War Crimes Bureau.   Yes, the Germans had a group inspecting other nations' war crimes. He winds up in the middle of the two month unearthing of Russian depredations at Katyn.  There are a few interesting plot points involving an NKVD spy in their midst, and a lot of solid information about what was going on in the spring of 1943. But, the story falls apart when Gunther engages in a personal tete-a-tete with, among all possible people, Field Marshall von Kluge and needs to be saved by, unbelievably, Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr.