Each month, Mireille Descombes presents her favorite. The specialist in black and police literature is also to be followed on her blog: “Polars, Polis et Cie”.
A thriller that takes place in Budapest! It is not common. And that it is written by a Hungarian, makes it even more interesting. Certainly, when she writes The fifth woman (published in 1963), her only thriller and her first novel in English, Maria Fagyas has lived in the United States for several years. Born in 1905 on the banks of the Danube, she left her country in 1937 with her husband to flee Nazism. She therefore did not experience the infamous events she evokes. But its sources are first -hand. And his memories do the rest.
The fifth woman has the decor the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a crazy hope of freeing oneself from the Communist yoke. The novel begins on October 27 at 6 p.m. In a city still plagued by euphoria, Inspector Lajos Nemetz, goes to work and observes with a very professional distance four corpses of aligned women “on the sidewalk in front of the bakery at the corner of Perc Köz”. They seem to have been killed by a Russian armored vehicle when they were queuing. When the policeman goes back to the same place at 10:50 p.m., it’s stupor! The corpse of a fifth woman joined the other four, and this woman, the policeman identifies her without hesitation.
