”It could be a late work, perhaps as late as 1570, when Titian was well into his eighties. There was a hurried, sketchy quality to some of the figures”It could be a late work, perhaps as late as 1570, when Titian was well into his eighties. There was a hurried, sketchy quality to some of the figures. It was reminiscent of The Death of Actaeon, but the stormy sky may have been finished by one of his workshop students, perhaps Polidoro da Lanciano, although she doubted Polidoro would have completed any of the late works. Titian hadn’t finished putting on the varnish, but in his final years he often left the varnish off parts of his paintings.
Alternatively, it could be a study for an early work, a mere sketch, something intended for Philip II, who liked both religious paintings and detailed nudes posing as naiads or some other mythological women who cavort about naked.
There was no signature.
Without the right equipment, it was hard for her to tell whether it was a Titian or a good forgery.”
I’ve read enough about the art world to know there are fakes hanging in the finest museums. There have been forgers throughout history who were better painters than their more famous counterparts whose art brings millions of dollars at auction. Telling a fake from the real thing? Well, experts can disagree, and it is ultimately up to the wealthy collectors or museum curators to decide if they believe the painting in question to be real. With the millions of dollars trading hands for paintings, you would think that whether a painting is real would be of the utmost importance, but really, to see a return on the investment, an owner only has to convince another buyer to believe that it is real, and a buyer only has to find an “expert” to confirm that it is real.
So this is the world that Helena Marsh works in. The wealthy, octogenarian Geza Marton has hired her to buy a Titian painting in Budapest that left the family’s possession during the war. The migration of art during World War II is a fascinating one, with many paintings still residing in the hands of the wrong owners. The Nazis and the Russians carted off as much European art as they could lay their hands on. Provenance is a term that plays a prominent role in the art world.
Marton isn’t contesting ownership; money is no object, and he wants to buy it back.
He doesn’t even care if it is real.
This should be a very straight forward transaction. After all, the owners want to sell, but soon Helena learns that there are multiple bidders for the painting, and some of them are willing to do anything to get what they want. As she tries to unravel the past so she can understand the present, she learns that Marton’s history is putting some very dangerous men in her path. As if she doesn’t have enough problems, she also has an ex-detective hot on her tail who is trying to understand what exactly she’s doing in Budapest.
Helena has a Bondesque skill set, with the ability to handle herself when situations get rough, and as people become more desperate, she has opportunities to showcase those skills. To keep herself safe and be able to move around the country freely, she assumes multiple identities as she investigates the nuances of this convoluted job. It is hard to hide the way we walk, and this observation by the detective is interesting: ”Close up, she seemed older than yesterday and older than the photo in his breast pocket. But the blond hair, the slim hips, the confident way she carried herself all added up to fortyish and foreign. Women in Hungary hadn’t walked like that for years, not since the economy tanked.” What I really like about that description is that it shows that Budapest is not just a setting for the author Anna Porter. She was born there, and that is an observation that can only come from someone who is intimately familiar with the inhabitants of the city.
I traveled to Budapest a few years ago, and as Porter moved me about the city, I kept having flashbacks to my time there. It is a city with a vibe, and Porter does an excellent job of putting the reader right in the middle of the geography.
This is not your typical thriller that relies only on a plot twist or a series of twists to keep the reader enthralled. You’ll be tasting the gulyás and the Halászlé and washing your hearty meal down with a bottle of Egri Bikavér. You’ll walk across the Széchenyi Chain Bridge and maybe have a moment of reflection while watching the rustling movement of the Danube. You’ll be looking over your shoulder for suspicious characters as you walk down Váci Street. You’ll be contemplating the hunched form of that snooping ex-detective as you sip your coffee at the Madal Cafe. You might even duck in the bathroom and emerge a different person.
Ahh yes...Budapest.
I also have a copy of the second Helena Marsh adventure titled Deceptions, and I can’t wait to see where Anna Porter takes me next.
ECW Press provided a copy to me in exchange for an honest review.
”’Don’t you remember the feeling, Mads? Where Death is your companion, and you not only shake hands with him, but you stay the night?’
‘I remember him ”’Don’t you remember the feeling, Mads? Where Death is your companion, and you not only shake hands with him, but you stay the night?’
‘I remember him taking Ilsa,’ said Molnar. ‘And I remember chasing him into the trenches and into hell to wring his neck. But all I ended up doing was helping him in his work. I became his salesman.’
‘You sold hundreds of tickets,’ said Miklos.
‘But I retired.’”
Mads Molnar may have retired, but the war machine didn’t get the message. To avoid a hanging squad, Molnar takes a job working for a gutless, prick of a Nazi, not that there is such a thing as a good Nazi, but there are some that are more loathsome than others. Colonel Karlin Riffel is one of those guys who would have been a failure in the real world but found a home with the Nazis.
A French vineyard owner, in an act of revenge, gives him a box of Pinot Noir poisoned with Abrus precatorius, more commonly known as the love pea. Cute name for a poison, eh? The juice inhibits cell protein synthesis, causing organ failure. Riffel sends off bottles to people he wants to impress, the type of people who can further his career. When he discovers the deception, he hires Molnar to find and destroy the bottles and more importantly destroy the damning notes he sent with them. They are a desperate pairing, Molnar one step ahead of a goon squad who will hang him and Riffel one inadvertent wine death away from a firing squad. Molnar wants to secure passage to his mother’s home country of Sweden so he can hopefully sit out the rest of the war in peace, but even he knows you can’t trust a Nazi any further than you can an alley cat with an open tin of tuna.
As Molnar chases down these lethal bottles of wine, he crosses swords with a crazed Detective Wolfram Bastick, a three hundred pound problem of angry muscle, who is out for revenge on whoever poisoned his father. His best lead is Molnar, and he’d love nothing more than to beat the information out of him. His fiance, the vivacious Marilyn Ghetz, leaves Wolfram at the altar to spirit away with Molnar. Adventure is what she wants, and Molnar is up to his eyeballs in intrigue. She proves to be much more resourceful than what Molnar could have imagined, but will her assets ultimately prove to be his undoing?
Plane chases, car chases, Nazis, an insane detective, bottles of toxic Pinot Noir, distracting damsels, and a battered detective make for one heck of a fun ride. This reminds me of a vintage pulp novel with a tip of the hat to the greats of Noir fiction. Once caught up in the story, I spun through the pages so quickly that I finished in one afternoon. If you love to hate Nazis, like a bit of wine in your mysteries, adore beautiful, resourceful women and men who know how to take a punch, then you will thoroughly enjoy riding along with Mads and Marilyn as they do their best to outwit the ruthless forces arrayed against them, so they can fly off into the sunset to a place far, far away from guns, SS uniforms, and booming death.
We were there in 1956, when the Soviets came back crushed the Hungarian revolution. Fleeing the country in a borrowed Skoda s”Lost souls, all of them.
We were there in 1956, when the Soviets came back crushed the Hungarian revolution. Fleeing the country in a borrowed Skoda sedan the color of dried blood, we passed scores of refugees escaping to the West. Some rode in carts piled with belongings but most walked, carrying a suitcase or two, small children trudging alongside the adults on the muddy roads. Hungarians held no illusions about their fate when order was restored. They’d been ‘liberated’ once before by the Russian Army.”
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This is the way the city of Budapest looked when the Walden’s arrived.
When the actress Cara Walden discovers that she has a half brother in Hungary, she drops everything, including her honeymoon--or should I say her honeymoon gets relocated to war torn Budapest?--to go find her brother in the middle of a chaotic revolution. Jakub, her new husband, is not only on board with this crazy mission, but as it turns out, he is more gung-ho than Cara wants him to be. Not to be left behind, her older brother Gray also accompanies them on this wild adventure in what they hope is a lull in the fighting before the Soviets return. Can they find their brother before the Soviets regroup and attempt to crush the rebellion? Will Cara be longing for the safe confines of a movie set, or will she be able to make a difference that will be something bigger than anything she has done before?
Lisa Lieberman, whom I have dubbed the Queen of the Hollywood Noir, brings to life Hollywood of the 1950s. This is the second book in what I hope will be a long running series of mysteries featuring Cara Walden. Lisa has graciously agreed to answer a few questions that were on my mind after reading the book.
Jeffrey Keeten: I like the way you drop the titles of books into your mysteries. You mentioned a book I’m very fond of, New Grub Street by George Gissing, and also the author George Orwell. A Dante quote actually becomes integral to the plot in Burning Cold. The main character, Cara’s older brother Gray, seems particularly, precociously, well read. From what I’ve read, actors from this time period were voracious readers. For me, books and life are inseparable. I get the impression that you, as well as your characters, feel the same way?
Lisa Lieberman: I was once waiting for a train, back in my high school days. I was sitting on a bench in the station, reading Agatha Christie and trying to ignore two boys nearby who were talking about girls. It was not an enlightened conversation. “What about her?” one of them said, indicating me. The other, who seemed to be the more expert of the two, dismissed me in two words: “too intelligent.”
My characters exist in a world where nobody would ever say that — a world very much like Goodreads, now that I think of it. That Dante quotation you mention, I found it because I joined a Group Read of The Divine Comedy. For months, I had the Clive James translation on my Kindle, always available should I need to kill time in the dentist’s chair or while waiting to pick up my daughter from tennis practice.
Primo Levi has a chapter in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, about what it meant to be an intellectual in Auschwitz. He did not have the consolations of a religious believer; prayer was no use to him. “Culture was useful to me,” he wrote. The memory of books he had read as a student before the war brought him solace in Auschwitz. Dante, most of all. He’d memorized vast portions of The Inferno in his classical high school and would recite passages to his fellow inmates. These efforts “made it possible for me to re-establish a link with the past,” he wrote, “saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity.”
I gave that to Zoltán (Cara and Gray’s long lost Hungarian brother), who’d survived the brutal penal camps of the Stalinist Rákosi regime. Prisoners really did recite poetry to one another, to keep their spirits alive. I discovered this while researching Stalin’s Boots, a nonfiction essay I published on the failed 1956 revolution. They created a sort of university in their cells at night, the educated inmates sharing their knowledge with their fellow prisoners from the working-class. Here’s how Cara came to understand what it meant, having Dante’s words in prison:
Abandon hope, all who enter here. The dreadful inscription that Dante placed on the gates of Hell. Zoltán had brought the poet’s unflinching vision into the darkness of Recsk to remind his fellow prisoners of the terrible beautiful pain of being alive, and that may very well have been what saved them. “Even a nightmare can be endured, if you are given the words to describe it,” I suggested.
JK: “Marlene Dietrich sashayed into the room wearing a man’s suit that made her look anything but boyish.” Dietrich is essential to any Hollywood Noir story so I was glad to see her making a cameo in your book. Which Hollywood icon can we look forward to seeing in your next book? (Dietrich has been quoted as saying that she dumped John Wayne because he didn’t read. My kind of girl!)
LL: The next book is set in Vietnam in 1957, during the filming of the Joseph Mankiewicz version of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. (Greene seems to be my co-pilot these days. Burning Cold builds off the Carol Read film of The Third Man, and I’m planning on taking the crew to Cuba next, à la Our Man in Havana.) But, getting back to Hollywood icons, Audie Murphy starred in the Mankiewicz film, and you wouldn’t believe the shenanigans that went on behind the scenes in Saigon.
JK: I’ve always had a fondness for the marriage of Nick and Nora Charles. Novels of the hardboiled variety seem to focus on the divorced, the bitter, and the miserable so I must say it was a breath of fresh air for me to see a couple in this type of novel who are crazy about each other. I do know they are in the lust more than the love phase of their relationship, but it feels like their relationship will play a big part in future novels. How do you see this relationship growing over the series?
LL: I recently watched The Thin Man and was shocked by how much Nick and Nora drank! Dashiell Hammett is reported to have said, when asked about his hobbies, "Let's see, I drink a lot." Cocktails aside, I love the banter between those two while they’re solving crimes. I love French caper movies, with their sexual frisson. All those depressed middle-aged guys with an attitude and a drinking problem get tiresome after awhile. I promise banter and lust as Cara and Jakub settle into married life while continuing to venture together into dangerous places.
JK: You have done extensive research on Hungary. Do you have special ties to that country?
LL: Actually, I do, but I wasn’t aware of this when I was writing Burning Cold. I knew that my father’s family had emigrated to America from some remote part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the nineteenth century, but the Dual Monarchy, as it was called, was so vast. Also, Jews moved around a lot, and nobody knew exactly where the family lived. But recently, some Lieberman cousin has done genealogical research and found the ship’s records for our paternal grandfather, whose last place of residence turns out to have been a town in the borderlands of eastern Hungary and Ukraine — an area not far from the Tokaj wine region where I’d decided, on a whim, that Cara’s father was born.
In fact, it was pretty random, making Robbie Hungarian. There were quite a few Hungarian expatriates in Hollywood during the golden age, actors like Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre, and two of my favorite directors, Michael Curtiz and George Cukor. I guess it was a kind of tribute, putting Robbie in that crowd, but he was well-assimilated. He’d changed his name from Roby Szabó to Robbie Walden and buried the past. His origins were immaterial in All the Wrong Places. There was no reason to think that Hungary would figure in a future book.
Then I started writing a nonfiction piece on the failed 1956 revolution and found myself getting drawn into the tragedy of the events. Next thing I knew, I was trying to figure out what would bring Cara to Budapest in the middle of a revolution. I’d already established that Robbie didn’t practice monogamy. Cara and her brother Gray were the products of different dalliances, and there’d been other women in between. What if Robbie had fathered a son back in Hungary? Zoltán would be close to forty by the time of the 1956 uprising. I imagined him as a purist sort who’d run afoul of the Communist regime. Now he’s one of the leaders of the rebellion, unlikely to survive the street battles, given his unwillingness to keep his head down. What if Gray and Cara learn of his existence and decide to go in during the lull in the fighting to bring him out before the Soviets came back? Once I came up with the idea of modeling the story on the movie The Third Man (produced by Alexander Korda, another non-monogamous expatriate Hungarian!), I was thoroughly committed. But who knew that I’d be tracing my own family history when my characters wound up in that border town in Tokaj? I chose it simply because I liked the name, Mád [pronounced Mard]. “We’d be mad to go there,” Gray says at one point. “Mard,” Cara corrects him.
JK: Movies have always been a great solace to me, and sometimes it isn’t the traditional great movies that I slide into the Blu Ray player to help me chase the blues away. The 13th Warrior, Before Sunrise, and To Have and Have Not are three movies I can think of off the top of my head that swing my mood in a positive direction. If things are really dire, it might take a Thin Man marathon. Since you are the Queen of Hollywood Noir can you share with us the five essential Lieberman movies that help you chase away the blues?
LL: Numero uno is Singin’ in the Rain, closely followed by Yankee Doodle Dandy. Generally, I need rousing song and dance numbers to cheer me up, but on those occasions when I want to wallow in it, there’s always A Star is Born. Poor Judy Garland. Two other sure-fire remedies, one with fizz (and Garbo), Ninotchka, and for pure catharsis, nothing beats a James Bond car chase with gadgets Goldfinger Car Chase Scene or ski chase The Spy Who Loved Me Ski Chase Scene.
JK: I know that you went away from a traditional publisher and self-published this book. More and more writers are going that route. I get emails from writers all the time complaining about the lack of support or marketing from publishers. They find they are doing most of the work anyway to promote their books, so why not take the next step and publish their book as well. Could you share with us some of your experiences with the process?
LL: I’d still be traditionally published if Five Star hadn’t dropped their mystery line in 2016, just as I was putting the finishing touches on this book. It’s very difficult to change publishers mid-series, but there are so many resources available to indie authors these days, and I’m finding that I like having everything under my own control. My standards are pretty high, and I don’t like how publishers are cutting corners. I hired first-class editors and was fortunate in being able to use the same production team to format the manuscript and design the cover — I loved the noir look of All the Wrong Places and wanted to keep the “brand.” I even treated myself to a glamorous new headshot.
As for publicity, my rule is that I have to enjoy what I’m doing for its own sake, and I’ve come up with some creative marketing strategies, such as lecturing about classic movies on a luxury cruise liner (I got a free trip to Asia, to scope out Vietnam for the third Cara Walden mystery, and brought my bridge game up to snuff). The mystery writing community is very supportive. My membership in Sisters in Crime gets me into public libraries to speak about writing with fellow mystery authors, and I’ll be on panels at some upcoming conferences this fall, including Bouchercon, the big mystery convention, which is in Toronto this year, a fun place to visit (I’m bringing my husband along).
JK: Since your novel takes place in the 1950s, I’ll ask yet another movie question. What five films from the 1950s are Lieberman essentials?
LL: The fifties was such a great decade, film-wise, I had a hard time narrowing it down to just five, but since you insist, I’ve come up with one Fellini film, Nights of Cabiria (1957), starring the magnificent Giulietta Masina; Billy Wilder’s noir masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard (1950); and three from France because I am, after all, a French historian: Bob le Flambeur (1956), a hip gangster film by Resistance-hero-turned-filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (Melville was his nom de guerre and, by the way, you have to pronounce Bob the way the French do, “Bub,” as opposed to "Bahb," which is how we Americans say it); The 400 Blows (1959), still Truffaut’s best film, as far as I’m concerned; and The Earrings of Madame de… (1953) by Max Ophuls, a historical drama that is sheer perfection.
To order your copies of Lisa's books go to: Passport Press
”Death smiled---a boyish smile---through an old man’s eyes.
‘Welcome,’ he said.”
When you live in those Middle European countries like Hungary, Roman”Death smiled---a boyish smile---through an old man’s eyes.
‘Welcome,’ he said.”
When you live in those Middle European countries like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Serbia, you grow up hearing stories of monsters. The very air, the darkness, the looming mountains, and the shrieks... at the very heart of the night... that stirs people from a sound sleep with terror blooming in the midst of their waking nightmares, convinces even the most cynical of minds to believe that evil beings lurk in the shadows of their lives.
Andre Palatazin, a Los Angeles Detective, known in California by the more American name Andy, was born in Hungary. He would have grown up in Hungary except one night his father returned as one of those things he had went hunting for…
A VAMPIRE.
”Papa had said, ‘Watch my shadow.’”
Andy and his mother, fortunately, escaped to the city of Angels. They are far, far away from those nefarious creatures that turn a man’s spine to ice and a woman’s heart to glass. Palatazin is searching for a killer nicknamed by the press The Roach because he liked to stuff cockroaches in the mouths of his victims.
Palatazin is frustrated because his leads are just a handful of frayed, broken strings, and The Roach continues to thrive. Los Angeles is a city of victims. ”Most of the girls, hopeful starlets from every state in the country, were very pretty; perhaps they’d modeled once or twice or done bit parts or even starred in a skin flick or two, but now for a variety of reasons their luck had just turned bad. They were the throwaways, the tissues some agent, director, or disco smooth-talker had sneezed into and then tossed out with the trash. All of them potential victims.”
For The ROACH.
He changes his Modus Operandi. Wanna-be starlets keep disappearing, but their corpses are not being found. The stress of trying to catch this serial killer, who is scaring the bejesus out of people, is starting to catch up with Palatazin.
Little does he know that the weeks he has spent trying to catch The Roach will be looked back on with something akin to fondness. The Roach is a monster, but he is a monster we can wrap our heads around. He is about to be eclipsed...by a plague of monsters.
Palatazin’s nightmares from Hungary have finally caught up with him.
”A hand and arm, as bone-white as marble and veined with blue, slithered out….”
What the hell is that?
”He pulled the sheet free from their faces...[They were] entwined together. Their faces were as white as carved stone, but what made Silvera almost cry out with terror was the fact that he could see their eyes through the thin, almost clear membranes of their closed eyelids. The eyes seemed to be staring right at him; they filled him with cold dread. He forced himself to reach down and feel the chests for heartbeats.
Their hearts weren’t beating. He felt for a pulse, found nothing.”
I’ve read a reasonable number of vampire books, and there are some good ones. I tend to like the ones that depict vampires the way they would be if they existed, feral, ferocious animals. The debonair, handsome, charming vampire that makes some women’s hearts go pitter patter and makes some men want to upchuck all over the plush leather seats of Stephenie Meyer’s Mercedes Benz is not the type of anemic monster you are going to find in this book.
These monsters...well…They Thirst.
Palatazin doesn’t have to be convinced that the “mythical” creatures from the nightmares of writers is real. He knows they are real, but convincing everyone else before it is too late is like asking for people to believe in the Easter Bunny. A man could be locked up with The Ghostbusters faster than he can say,...but really I’m not crazy. Unfortunately, it isn’t like Andy can laugh maniacally from his prison cell window as humanity is eviscerated and replaced by an army of fanged goons. Palatazin, for the people he loves and even humanity at large, has to find a way to to stop Prince Conrad Vulkan and his plan to subjugate the human race.
Meanwhile he can’t afford to lose his mind.
Fortunately,
he won’t be alone.
”There are four who would destroy you. They approach even now, as you lie dreaming of glory. Four pieces---one is a knight, another is a bishop, a third is a rook, and the fourth is a pawn.”
Can they beat the gathering storm that threatens to turn daylight into perpetual night?
This book was published in 1981 and is a perfect example of those epic, somewhat bloated, horror books that are actually hefty enough to bash in the skull of a vampire, or swat the fanny of a recalcitrant werewolf, or put a large hole in the ectoplasm of an annoying ghost. I, for one, enjoyed the ride that Robert McCammon took me on. This was a bit of 1980s nostalgia that actually made me shudder more than once...those entwined, cocooned, hibernating beasts are still haunting my daymares and nightmares. *teeth chattering shiver of impending doom*
”Maids drank ground-up match heads to poison themselves and flung themselves in front of trams. Barbers dismembered their lovers. Divorcees slashed th”Maids drank ground-up match heads to poison themselves and flung themselves in front of trams. Barbers dismembered their lovers. Divorcees slashed their veins with razors. Tradesmen’s apprentices leaped off the Franz Joseph Bridge. Jealous civil servants cut their wives to shreds with butcher knives. Businessmen shot their rivals with revolvers. The possibilities were endless, and yet they were oppressively the same, for the end was always identical.”
This book is set in the 1930s, but with a little quick research I was unsettled to find that Hungary still ranks very high for suicides. In fact in the recent figures they are 10th in the world for most suicides per 100,000 residents, so unfortunately they are still struggling with depression. (Interesting enough the most dangerous place for melancholy and suicide is Greenland by a WIDE margin, so if you are of a sad nature and are thinking about moving to Greenland...reconsider.) This book is set in the 1930s and so given the alarming number of girls that are poisoning themselves finding a body of a young lady with no marks of violence on her body on Nagy Diofa Street was no surprise to the reporter and hero of our story Zsigmond Gordon. Still there were nagging concerns.
One of the problems with Hungary is that they are a country that has suffered from what could be a record number of occupations. Beginning with the Celts, Romans, Huns, Slavs, Gepids, and Avars. More recently they were occupied by the Germans during WW2 quickly followed by the Soviets. When we toured Budapest a few years ago the tour guide, very candidly told me that Hungary simply can’t fight, horrible fighters. “They have lost every battle they have ever fought.” Now instead of scoffing at their lack of warrior prowess it was actually an endearing moment for me. People who just can’t embrace war just might be more evolved than the rest of us. As we toured all these monolithic, dark, gothic, empty churches my wife asked why they were empty? The tour guide said, “Because after the Germans and the Soviets we felt that GOD had turned his face away from us.” (The way she said it I can’t possibly adequately express here, but it still gives me a lump in my throat every time I think about it.) They are a nation of agnostics. Maybe instead of sending missionaries to Afghanistan the churches of America need to send people to Hungary. It may be shocking to some for me to be advocating religion, but I know it provides solace for a number of people and I have to believe that the people of Hungary need something more than what they have now.
After discovering a nude picture of the girl in the desk drawer of the police chief, Nosy Gordon as is the nature of investigative reporters, becomes more intrigued with discovering the facts of the case and when the identity of the girl is revealed he is spurred on. When he starts to realize he is over his head and wants to let go the threads of the mystery his talented and artistic girlfriend Krisztina insists that he must do his job and find out who is really behind this girl’s death.
Gordon gets the absolute crap beat out of him.
Okay up until this point I was starting to really wonder where the NOIR of the book was going to come into play. Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Lew Archer are just not digging deep enough into the case unless they get sapped from behind or bruised by a few fists.
”Gordon could hear the man’s fingers cracking as he made a fist. He didn’t even see the fourth blow coming--which for once didn’t land in his gut but on his chin. Gordon felt his lips tear and heard his teeth grind as they slid over each other. The man behind him now let him go. Gordon collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut. His head knocked hard against the pavement.”
And what self-respecting villain doesn’t threaten your significant other as he walks away from leaving you bleeding on the pavement.
”You should call it quits here and now. If you don’t, your pretty little girlfriend won’t look so pretty with a sliced-up face.”
[image]
Gyula Gombos died before the shit hit the fan.
Gordon becomes more determined than ever to bring down those responsible. The prime minister Gyula Gombos has died and the city is holding it’s breath as power is being reallocated. Policemen are busy with preparing for the grand parades and the civic events that are surrounding a state funeral and have little time to worry about one girl’s death. Political intrigue adds overtones to the state of affairs. The matter of fact way that the characters discuss political corruption and the helplessness they feel about being able to change the path of their nation gives the reader an idea of what it means to be landlocked between powerful countries and having to be resigned to the fact that there is no escaping any upcoming conflict. You can smell the sulfurous stench of emerging Nazism and can feel the palatable fear of a population with a very uncertain future. I’m looking forward to more entries in this series.
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