Honor

Michael Karel, a police officer on the rise, stakes his honor on solving a murder case in Belgrade assigned to him by the Party, who, at the same time, is stopping him with lies, disinformation, and silence

When Jan Horvath is shot down at point-blank range in front of his house in one of Belgrade's best neighborhoods, it turns out that he had been an officer in the military counterintelligence organization, the KOS. Yugoslavia's public and state security services, not to mention the KOS, want to take over the case, in the interest of "national security" to prevent any embarrassment to the government. But Judge Anton Trevian thinks veteran municipal police detective-sergeant Michael Karel has the best angle on the investigation. In this richly plotted, Gorky Parklike novel, a communist bureaucracy appears in a notably humane guise. The narrative reaches back to the W W II struggles of the Yugoslavian partisans and their German opponents as well as to the Spanish Civil War. A subtheme is the plight of Karel (his marriage is on the rocks) and his mistress (she's a civilian employee of the military counterintelligence but suspect because she's Jewish). The resolution of the mystery comes as a genuine surprise in this thoroughly entertaining thriller.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When police sergeant Michael Karel delves into the 1970 Belgrade shooting death of Jan Horvath, a mysteriously well-off man with a KOS (Military Counter Intelligence) background, he encounters personal and political complications that culminate in the imprisonment of the wrong man for murder. The theme of honor shows itself in the people involved with Horvath (a man of many aliases and allegiances), people whose experiences in war-torn and then Communist Yugoslavia tempered their particular codes of honor. Karel himself makes it a point of honor to confront the innocent prisoner on the day of his release in 1983. This minor philosophical tinge, a somewhat unusual locale, and the concentration on personal conflicts result in a modestly effective mixture of police procedural and espionage thriller.Rex E. Klett, Anson Cty. Lib., Wadesboro, N.C.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.