Self's Punishment

Starred review from March 15, 2005
This stellar series debut presents former Nazi prosecutor turned private investigator Gerhard Self in an unsettlingly matter-of-fact style. Instead of the brooding and tortured soul readers might expect--or even demand--Gerd (as his many friends call him) comes across as wry and likable as he hustles up cases, flirts with attractive women of all ages, and worries about slipping into old age with only his cat for company. It's the early 1980s, and Self has been hired by a boyhood friend to smoke out a hacker who's playing havoc with the computers at Rhineland Chemical Works. But after Self springs a trap that gets the troublemaker murdered, he gradually faces the guilt he still carries for his youthful embrace of National Socialism. His simple refusal to let himself off the hook and step back into his old public prosecutor's role after the war doesn't seem like penance enough anymore. "I had planned to live at peace with my past," he muses. "Guilt, atonement, enthusiasm and blindness, pride and anger, morality and resignation--I'd brought it all together in an elaborate balance. The past had achieved abstraction." But Self's unwitting participation in the new crime drives him to pursue the path of justice wherever it may lead. A fascinating exploration of how people often manage to carve out normal lives even after being complicit in terrible acts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)