Adam LeBor

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. Elad Harari, a young Israeli historian, has disappeared. Harari was working in the archives of the city’s Jewish Museum, investigating the fate of the assets of the Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

It’s clear that his research is setting off alarm bells at one of the country’s most powerful companies. The more Balthazar digs into the case, the more he is certain that shadowy forces are in play. The threats against Balthazar soon turn to violence. It’s clear that if he is to find the historian he will have to go face-to-face with some very dangerous people – and confront the darkest era in Hungary’s past.

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 transform Hungary.

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. He knows that his investigation is more than likely to lead back to the seat of power, the Országház, in Kossuth Square… but he does not expect to be swept into his own family’s dark past too.

When Balthazar Kovacs, a detective on Budapest’s murder squad, gets a message on his telephone showing a dead body at 26, Republic Square, the former Communist Party headquarters, he gulps down his coffee and goes there immediately. But the body has gone and Kovacs has started his journey deep into Budapest’s dark heart, towards a deadly intersection of the criminal underworld, the corridors of power and the ghosts of history. A journey that will force him to choose between the law and family loyalty.

Yael Azoulay, covert negotiator for the UN Secretary General, has made a powerful enemy in Clarence Clairborne, head of Washington, DC lobbying and security firm the Prometheus Group. He’s fixated on revenge – and Yael knows it. She’s definitely being followed, but Clairborne’s operatives are not the only ones tracking her every move. Unexpected visitors from her past have arrived, determined to make her confront the secrets she’s been hiding.

Yael Azoulay, the UN covert negotiator, had to kill or be killed when she went rogue in Geneva. Now back in New York, she is tasked with meeting the man at the dark heart of the American military industrial complex. Yael soon discovers a chilling conspiracy that reaches to Iran… and a dark secret from her past.

Yael Azoulay does the United Nations’ dirty work by cutting deals that most of us never hear about. Equally at home in the caves of Afghanistan, the slums of Gaza, or corporate boardrooms all across the world, Yael believes the ends justify the means… until she’s pushed way beyond her breaking point.

Inspired by declassified US intelligence reports. A sinister conspiracy thriller based on 1944 US intelligence documents which reveal how Nazi leaders planned a Fourth Reich – not a military empire, but an economic one.

Meet Yael Azoulay, the brilliant and beautiful behind-the-scenes negotiator for the United Nations. Tasked with persuading an Afghan warlord – and friend of hers – to surrender to the Americans, she is quickly pulled into into a dangerous world of secret rendition, torture and arms trafficking to Syrian rebels. The high-stakes game soon turns deadly as Yael finds herself up against a shadowy agency of the US government. Everything depends on her next move…