Publisher's Synopsis
Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar, a proletariat writer in addition to a state militia homicide detective, is a man on the brink. Estranged from his wife, whom he believes is cheating on him with one of his colleagues, and frustrated by writer's block, Ferenc's attention is focused on his job. But his job is increasingly political, something that makes him profoundly uncomfortable. When Ferenc is asked to look into the disappearance of a party member's wife and discovers that she might have run away from her abusive husband, he wishes he could do anything but return her to him. At the same time, the militia officers are pressed into service policing a demonstration, one that Ferenc might rather be participating in, and he refuses. These two situations, coupled with an investigation into the murder of a painter by a man recently released from the camps, brings Ferenc closer to danger than ever before-from himself, from his superiors, from the capital's shadowy criminal element.
