District VIII - 1

Life's tough for a Gypsy cop 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 message on his phone from a blocked number he gulps down the rest of his morning coffee, grabs his police ID 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.

But when Kovacs arrives at Republic Square, the body has gone...

Danube Blues will reveal the hidden Budapest, an underworld that visitors never get to see: the gritty back-alleys of District VIII; the endemic corruption that reaches deep into the government as officials and their business allies plunder state coffers at will; a rule of law bent to serve the interests of the rich, well-connected and powerful; the rising power of international organised crime gangs who use the Hungarian capital as a springboard for their European operations and the ghosts of Communism and Nazism that still haunt Hungary.