Excellent book that did not lose anything with the passage of time - everything described in it, from activities of organized crime to the way business sometimes works hand in hand with gangsters in order to raise profits is applicable to our times as it was in late 1930's.

Highly recommended to anyone enjoying a great thriller. ( )

This was a pretty good story, although I think I missed somethings for a couple of reasons, such as it being an audiobook, not knowing as much about the history as I should, etc.

I found it a little hard to keep up with some of the characters, and at the end of the book, certain things happened that must have been important to the story, but I didn't know how it all fit together. But I didn't really have time to go back and figure it all out, so I will assume my enjoyment was reduced somewhat. ( )

An excellent and intelligent thriller depicting the crumbling mask of civilisation in the immediate pre-war era in continental Europe. Eric Ambler’s extremely atmospheric tale sees the English crime writer Charles Latimer travelling abroad in between novels. Witness to the corpse of a wanted criminal recovered from The Bosphorus, Latimer’s writerly curiosity gets the better of him as he sets out to discover the story that led the victim to his grisly end. Full of richly evocative period detail, international political intrigue, and a page-turning sequence of criminal revelations, Ambler succeeded in writing a belter of a novel that paved the way for many of the 20th century’s best regarded thriller and espionage authors. ( )

A disappointment. Often cited by Alan Furst and many others as the best novel to that covers the pre-war atmosphere of continental Europe. It starts off that way, but I never connected with the protagonist and found his motivation weak. The end of the novel is much more a dialogues between him and Mr. Peters, with little action or intrigue. Ambler's other pre-war novels are better. ( )

I found this novel to be meandering, and it had too much first person narrative for my liking. A writer is taken to see the remains of Dimitrios, who has a checkered past. The writer then decides to look into his life, and discovers much more than is known by the police who found the body. I did not realize until reading the afterword that this book was written in the 1930s. ( )