Loved it. Born Hungarian and eager to visit again, I will look for more of the landmarks in the story. Great story to get a feel for the prewar Hungary. A great story in its own right, the setting and the mystery work together to create a great reading experience. ( )

Another fascist-era detective a la Bernie Gunther. (Bernie even gets a mention on page 80.) But the villain is not--oops, don't want to spoil anything.
Our hero, a newspaper reporter called Mr. Editor by the underlings of the world, is not an antifa; he just wants a little justice for a nice, well-educated, middle-class jewish woman, a young pregnant one. Who is dead, dead, dead.
Mr Editor is not a smart-ass Bernie Gunther/Sam Spade/Marlowe, but more of a straight shooter. He does follow the normal detective path, however, being semi-seduced, threatened, and beaten, but he lives on to pee a clean stream and fight for the righting of small wrongs.
Lots of Budapest background: you know all the trolley lines before the book ends. You almost figure out the small-country politics and meet the bit players in the fascist league. You learn the fight scene--legit and bare-knuckle. You even get out of the city to tromp through the mud and eat wild boar in a village.
Not bad, but not great, a two-night read when you don't have anything else to do. ( )

“And aren’t you curious even now about what a Jewish streetwalker would have been doing here?” Krisztina fixed her eyes on Gordon. “And as long as we’re on the subject, have you ever seen a Jewish prostitute? If you want my opinion, the question is not how she died, but how a Jewish girl—probably from a respectable, bourgeois family—ended up becoming a prostitute in the first place.”

This passage summarizes the main mystery in the book and sets up the reader for a richly engrossing and atmospheric ride in 1930s Budapest. Full disclosure: I love noir. I love Budapest as a setting. I love fiction set during this era. So yes, I may be a wee bit biased on this one, but I loved this book. As I read, I kept waiting for protagonist Zsigmond Gordon, a crime reporter, to arrange a clandestine meeting with an Edward G. Robinson character on a foggy night at the Citadella. (Okay, so Robinson was Romanian, but work with me here.) Sadly, that never happened, but there was more than enough comparable material to keep me turning the pages. And this is true noir, and not something else labeled as such because someone thinks the word is fashionable and hip, or any such thing. What that means is that things don't all end happily ever after and gift-wrapped with Disney paper and pretty bows. But then again, very few stories from Budapest in 1936 would have ended any other way. ( )

An interesting book in a noir-ish style and an exotic setting, but with some contemporary feeling added. The plot concerns a young middle-class Jewish woman, who turns up dead on the street, and an American-Hungarian reporter who tracks down the nasty family and social circumstances around her death. Although not personally involved in her story, he feels compelled to follow it up and to an extent take a kind of vengeance, both for her and his troubles. There is a range strong female characters with agency, though neither the female nor the male characters are particularly attractive, and the male reporter is the centre of the story. It builds slowly to some rather sharp violence, which is probably in keeping with the style and theme of the story, and the setting of pre-Nazi Hungary. The political scene is a backdrop, and well integrated into the storyline, but not central to the plot. Although very gritty, it does give a memorable picture of the life of the middle and lower classes in a middle-European city in the 1930s. ( )

"Fresh Meat" by Victoria Janssen for Criminal Element

I’m always intrigued by historical mysteries, and by settings outside of those I’m familiar with, so the pre-World War Two Budapest Noir filled two niches for me immediately; that it’s also noir was just the cherry on top. (Can cherries be noir? Maybe if they’re black cherries?) The historical setting is full of precursors to World War Two and hints of future communist grimness, all perfect for noir’s themes of morality and justice, or the lack thereof. It’s full of characters dense with entrenched suspicions of each other, the law, and the government.

The novel’s hero, Zsigmond Gordon, is not a private investigator, but he is a journalist who specializes in crime. Gordon has the requisite Philip Marlowe-esque combination of cynicism and moral strength, and is in a position to investigate crimes through his contacts with the police. Throughout, his world-weary tone gives the feel of old-school detective novels.

Read the rest at http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2012/01/fresh-meat-budapest-noir-by-vilmos-...