If the Dead Rise Not is a crime novel by Philip Kerr, the sixth in the series starring Berlin police detective Bernhard Gunther.
He is faced with three apparently unrelated crimes: the theft of a Ming dynasty box, the death of a hotel guest and a body found floating in the river.
The settings allow for extensive reflection on the nature of dictatorial regimes and their effects on human behaviour and more particularly on the impact of Nazi race laws on Jews.
[3] Bernie Gunther, house detective at the Hotel Adlon, accidentally kills policeman August Krichbaum with a single punch.
Policeman Liebermann von Sonnenberg asks Bernie to mentor young officer Richard Bömer, and he takes him along to investigate a body found floating in the river.
Otto Trettin sends the Chinese box to Bernie, who returns it to Reles, minus the tender documents that were inside.
After he leaves, Reles immediately phones Von Helldorf, head of the Potsdam police, whose men promptly arrest him.
He refuses to sign a 'D-11' form consenting to protective custody (i.e. concentration camp) and after a week they release him – the explanation being that Noreen went back to America and promised not to wrote about the Olympic scandal.
Othman Weinberger, who has ambitions to be promoted to Berlin, tells him Reles is a Hungarian-German Jewish gangster from Brooklyn, who mysteriously took over the Würzburg Jura Limestone company.
It is later revealed that Bernie told Reles that he could silence Weinberger by threatening to have Emil Linthe fabricate him a Jewish past.
Noreen asks Bernie to help keep her daughter Dinah on the straight and narrow as she has fallen into bad company and plans to marry Reles.
Reles had continued to admire Bernie and gives him a job as general manager of the Saratoga Hotel, and an Asprey backgammon set.
Bernie wins 32,000 pesos from Jose Orozco Garcia, owner of the sleazy Shanghai club, using the latter’s pornographic set.
Local militia captain Sanchez, who has become his friend, asks him to accompany him to look at yet another body, that of Irving Goldstein, a pit boss at the casino.
At Goldstein’s place, Sanchez conveniently finds the plans for Bramit silencer for a Nagant revolver, which solves the Reles killing and defuses an incipient gang war.
Bernie rescues Lopez from secret policeman Quevedo, who has pulled out his fingernails, but in turn has to agree to spy on another gangster, Lansky.