London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow âemigrâes, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares worsen...A forgotten classic by the film-maker of Powell and Pressburger fame, The Glass Pearls (1966) is not only a thrilling feat of Hitchcockian noir but a haunting dissection of guilt, paranoia and moral ambiguity--book flap.