Description
As communism collapsed throughout Eastern Europe, a crime took place in Bucharest that disturbed neither the conscience of its perpetrator not the moral code of the Old Regime.
Working as a translator in the autumn of 1995, Liliana Branoza encounters Octav Mincu, the party official who raped her. Political influence in Romania still resides with men like Mincu, leading members of Ceausescu’s government who have since adopted ill-defined business relationships. Suspected of supplying chemical weapons to the Serbs, his gregarious presence at an international trade fair demonstrates how little has changed in Liliana’s own life, and that of her country.
She is passionate testimony to Mincu’s crimes against the body; Royston Cox, an avuncular English spy, has been despatched to Bucharest to investigate his crimes against humanity. With her mind set on revenge, Liliana is prepared to be seduced by her corrupter. But Cox is also performing an act of seduction: coaxing, tantalising, manipulating Liliana into a secret world of betrayal, scandal and politically motivated murder.
Paperback, 314 pages. In good to very good pre-loved condition.