About this item
Set in the long, hot Hungarian summer of 2015 -- and revealing the hidden, criminal world beneath Budapest's glittering facade -- District VIII is the first novel in the new Detective Balthazar Kovacs mystery series. Life's tough for a Gypsy detective in Budapest. The cops don't trust you because you're a Gypsy. Your fellow Gypsies, even your own family, shun you because you're a cop. The dead, however, don't care. So when Balthazar Kovacs, a detective in the city's murder squad, gets a mysterious text message on his phone, he gulps down his coffee and goes to work. The message has two parts: a photograph and an address. The photograph shows a man, in his early thirties, lying on his back with his eyes open, half-covered by a blue plastic sheet. The address is 26 Republic Square, the former Communist Party headquarters, and once the most feared building in the country.
About the Author
I am a British author and journalist. I grew up in London in the 1970s and studied at Leeds University, where I also edited the student newspaper. I enjoyed a peripatetic career on a number of Fleet Street newspapers with assignments that ranged from seeking London's best dry Martini to investigating Nazi war criminals who found sanctuary in Britain.
In 1991 I decided to become a foreign correspondent and moved to Budapest to cover the aftermath of the collapse of Communism. I also spent much time in the former Yugoslavia, covering the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. I moved to Paris for a year in 1997 to write a thriller, which eventually became The Budapest Protocol, then returned to Budapest. Over the years I have worked in more than 30 countries and enjoyed some hair raising adventures along the way. I now write for the Economist, The Times (of London) , Monocle, Traveler and many others and I review books for the New York Times and the Financial Times. I also teach journalism at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.
I've written eight non-fiction books and two novels, which have been published in twelve languages including Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Hungarian. These include the ground-breaking Hitler's Secret Bankers, which exposed Swiss economic complicity with Nazi Germany and which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize; a biography of Slobodan Milosevic, now regarded as the standard work on his life and City of Oranges, which recounts the lives of Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, and which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Prize.
I am especially interested in the inter-face between fact and fiction. Complicity with Evil, my investigation into the United Nation's failure to stop genocide, helped inspire my new thriller series, featuring a smart, feisty but haunted heroine. The Geneva Option, the first in a series of books featuring Yael Azoulay, is published by Telegram in Britain and HarperCollins in the US. You can read one of Yael's adventures for free by downloading The Istanbul Exchange, available here for Kindle and from the publisher, HarperCollins US, in all formats.
Tower of Basel, my investigative history of the Bank for International Settlements, the world's most secretive and influential financial institution, is published in the US and Britain in June by PublicAffairs. It's quite a story.
