In 1942,there are worse places to be than Zurich, and detective Bernie Gunther has seen his fair share of them. So when a superior asks him to track down a glamorous German actress believed to be hiding in Zurich, he takes the job. The actress, it emerges, is the daughter of a fanatical Croatian fascist, the sadistic commandant of a notorious concentration camp, and Bernie finds himself involved in something much more sinister.

September 1941: Bernie Gunther's old boss, Reinhard Heydrich, orders him to Prague to stay at his country house. When a body is found in a room locked from the inside, the spotlight falls on Bernie to solve the mystery. If he fails to do so, he knows what is at stake - the reputation of Heydrich, a man who does not like to lose face. So begins the most diplomatically sensitive case of Bernie Gunther's police career.

It's 1954, and Bernie Gunther sails to Florida, where he's arrested, returned to Cuba, and imprisoned. There he meets Castro, and a French intelligence officer, Thibaud. Exhaustively questioned by Thibaud, Bernie is flown to Berlin with a proposition: work for the French or hang for murder. But Bernie's past as a German POW in Russia is about to catch up with him - in a way he could never have foreseen.

It is 1956 on the French Riviera. A world-weary Bernie Gunther is working as concierge at the Grand Hotel, living under a false name. Then his past walks through the door in the shape of Harold Hennig, a former captain in the Nazi security service. Bernie never forgets a face, especially when it belongs to a mass murderer who, in 1945, was responsible for the deaths of thousands; among them a woman Bernie loved. Bernie has a score to settle with Hennig…

Berlin, 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just 18 months but already Germany has seen some unpleasant changes. Forced to resign as a homicide detective, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. The discovery of two bodies involves Bernie in the lives of two hotel guests. One is a beautiful journalist intent on persuading America to boycott the Berlin Olympiad; the other is a German-Jewish gangster who plans to use the Olympics to enrich himself.

It's 1956 and Bernie Gunther is on the run. Ordered by Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, to murder Bernie's former lover by thallium poisoning, he finds his conscience is stronger than his desire not to be murdered in turn. Now he must stay one step ahead of Mielke's retribution. The man Mielke has sent to hunt him is an ex-Kripo colleague, and as Bernie pushes towards Germany he recalls their last case together, finding that there is some unfinished business awaiting him in Germany....

1957, Munich. Bernie Gunther's latest move sees him working for an insurance company. 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’s convinced the sinking was no accident. Then the claimant is found dead. Bernie is strong-armed into helping the Greek police with their investigation. Who is behind the murder, and why?

Posing as an escaping Nazi war criminal, Bernie Gunther, Berlin's hardest-boiled private eye, arrives in Buenos Aires. When he reveals his real identity to the local chief of police, he discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie's final case as a homicide detective.

Munich in 1949 is a place where a private eye can find a lot of not-quite-reputable work. It fills Bernie Gunther with disgust - but it also fills his sorely depleted wallet. Then a woman seeks him out. Her husband has disappeared. She's not looking to get him back - he's a wanted man who ran one of the most vicious concentration camps in Poland. She just wants confirmation that he's dead.

Ex-policeman Bernie Gunther thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin - until he turned freelance and he is sucked further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. The year is 1936 and Berlin is preparing for the Olympic Games. Some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realise that they should have left while they could, and Bernie himself has been hired by a wealthy industrialist to investigate two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party.

Bernie Gunther had his first brush with evil as a policeman in 1930s Berlin and came to know it intimately as a private eye under the Nazis, when each case drew him deeper into the enormities of the regime. Now the war is over and Gunther is in Vienna, trying to clear an old friend of the murder of an American officer. Amid decaying imperial splendour, he traces sprials of depravity that lead him to a former head of the Gestapo.

Constable Paul Hirschhausen has a snowdropper on his patch. Someone is stealing women’s underwear and Hirsch knows enough about that kind of crime - how it can escalate - not to take it lightly. But the more immediate concerns are a call from the high school, a teacher worried about a student who may be in danger at home. Another call, a different school: a man enraged about the principal’s treatment of his daughter.

Europe, 1990. As the US begins to pull out its troops in a tide of isolationism, Britain is torn between its loyalties to the USA and its continental neighbours. In America, a space shuttle crashes on landing, killing all but one of the crew on-board: a British man named Mike Dreyfuss, who will become vilified by the US press and protesters. Halfway across the world, Martin Hepton, an English ground control technician watches as they lose contact with the most advanced satellite in Europe.

Martin Scarsden's new life seems perfect, right up until the moment it's shattered by a voice mail: a single scream, abruptly cut off, from his partner, Mandalay Blonde. Racing home, he finds an unconscious man sprawled on the floor and Mandy gone. Someone has abducted her. But who and why? So starts a twisting tale of intrigue and danger, as Martin probes the past of the woman he loves, a woman who has buried her former life so deep she has never mentioned it.

America, 1960. In Washington, DC, John F. Kennedy has just been elected president. In Havana, Fidel Castro has been in office for a year, and with Cold War tensions rapidly heating up and the Soviets leading the space race, the thought of a Communist leader so close to home is already raising American blood pressure. Anti-Communist fever is rampant in the USA, with a paranoid establishment seeing reds under every bed. Nevertheless, the decision to snuff out the threat of Castro by hiring Tom Jefferson, America's best assassin, to kill him comes from an unusual quarter: the Mafia.