Danube Blues

Balthazar Kovacs, a detective on Budapest's murder squad, is on the trail of a dead man. Minutes ago, Kovacs received an anonymous SMS showing a body and an address: 26 Republic Square – the former Communist Party headquarters and once the most feared building in the country. But now, amid the...

When Detective Balthazar Kovacs is called out before dawn to a brothel owned by his brother, he knows it can only be bad news. A customer has died in the brothel's VIP room. Worse still, he's an Arab financier, a guest of government, connected to a massive investment programme that could...

Budapest, January 2016. The Danube is grey and half-frozen, covered with ice, and the city seems to have gone into hibernation. But not for Detective Balthazar Kovacs. He has been called out to investigate the disappearance of a young Israeli historian, Elad Harari. Harari was working in the archives of the city's Jewish museum, researching what happened to the assets of the Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. His work could bring justice to the families of those who died, but it seems not everyone welcomed his probing into the country's darkest period.