Dohany Street

Dohany Street is the final book in Adam Lebor’s trilogy featuring the gypsy detective Balthazar Kovacs, whose past exploits have gained him considerable fame in Budapest. His focus this time is a company that mysteriously acquired assets after the war, a period of upheaval in Hungarian history in which local Nazis took control, at the cost of thousands of Jewish and Roma lives.

Kovacs is alerted by his neighbour to the disappearance of her boarder Elad, a visiting Israeli researching the confiscation and theft of assets from Jews in 1944/5. At that time, the Hungarian Nazi organisation Arrow Cross consigned the owners of such assets to camps, and in most cases, death. Before he went missing, Elad recorded several sightings of a blue Mercedes and believed he was being followed.

Also interested is a journalist, Zsuzsa, commissioned by her online news employer 555.hu to investigate Nationwide, a Hungarian company that sprang to life in 1948 and which has done well both under communist regimes and subsequently. When her boss drags his feet publishing her findings, she realises that the investigation was designed merely to enable better concealment of Nationwide’s murky origins.

Nationwide’s current owner Karoly Bardossy is the son of the founder, and the uncle of Reka, the Hungarian Prime Minister. Reka is unpopular in the polls, partly because extremist groups have been making trouble, and he is aware that someone is funding their activities. A visit from the Israeli Prime Minister is due in the next few days, and the PR benefits will be useful, provided Elad’s disappearance does not derail the meeting.

The activities of these parties as well as the secret services of both Israel and Hungary, the latter represented by the attractive Anastasia, take up most of the book, and there are a few tense moments with gunplay, fisticuffs and a murder. The excitement is really generated by Lebor’s careful obfuscation of the interests of the various groups rather than the action, which somehow doesn’t pack much of a punch.

As with the forerunners in the series, Lebor fills the pages with interesting detail about the history of Budapest both during and after World War II: the politics, culture and architecture. Lebor confesses in his acknowledgements that he was captivated by the city on arrival as a foreign correspondent, and this comes across. He points out that evidence of dreadful wartime events, and of communist atrocities too, are still visible in the city if you know where to look.

Kovacs is as usual the centre of activity, a man who has distanced himself from his Roma heritage but remains the target of much prejudice from the gadje, non-gypsies, not that this seems to adversely affect his powers as a babe magnet.