検索キーワード： 著者 "Adam LeBor" すべてのカテゴリー

Drawing on original research in Hungarian, German and English, and first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews and archives, The Last Days of Budapest is a vivid, dramatic and moving account of the slow death of a cosmopolitan and beautiful European city and its eventual liberation. Adam LeBor brings the skills of a thriller writer to this spellbinding work of narrative history.

Although Hungary was a German ally in 1941, two years into World War II, it was still possible for Allied prisoners of war, French and Polish refugees, spies of every kind, and the city’s large Jewish population to live openly, enjoying the cafes and boulevards that made Budapest one of the great European capitals. While the other multicultural centers of Europe had fallen to the almost all-consuming conflict, Budapest remained intact. In September 1944, three months after D-Day, life in the city seemed idyllic. But under the guise of peace existed an undercurrent of tension and anxiety.

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.

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 transform Hungary. It looks like a heart attack – but why has the brothel's CCTV footage been erased? Kovacs knows only too well the treacherous undercurrents that permeate life in Hungary's capital - the deadly intersection between the criminal underworld, the corridors of power and the ghosts of history.

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 ruins of the demolished building, Kovacs finds no dead body, just six members of the Gendarmerie - an elite police force reporting directly to the prime minister - and an invitation to hand over his phone and cease his investigation.