Product Description

Rosso is the Detective Inspector trying to find a brutal murderer in the heart of a Balkan city ravaged by war. He has learnt to take each day as it comes, with bullets anddeath around every corner. Luka is crime boss, intent on exploiting the misery of his city's inhabitants while also providing the only means of defence they have left. Tanja is the young woman loved, and set up, by both men and faced with an impossible conflict of. Flett is the foreign reporter, a citizen who hears and sees it all, partially protected by his job, but like the others, sucked in to the mire that is Sarajevo, once an elegant capital, now a battered but defiant place torn apart by a civilisation that has turned on itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #290994 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'I wouldn't compare this to Gorky Park, I would compare it to Dante's Inferno. The mystery is, why aren't there more books as good as this? The reason is that very few of us have been to places as dark as this, and John Fullerton has.' Martin Cruz Smith

Literary Review
Absolutely first-rate...shocking enough to steal the breath and bruise the heart...Too good to miss. (refers to hardback)

Irish Times
Highly accomplished. This is writing of the first rank...(refers to the hardback)

Customer Reviews

Why a single life matters
This is one of the best anti-war books - and crime novels - I've read. A lone policeman insists on investigating the murder of a young woman - although murders are happening every day in Sarajevo at the hands of the Serb nationalists surrounding the city. This is a heart-rending story of conscience, a man's love for his fellow man, for his alcoholic wife, for his city, for a young woman. A wonderful war story.

Exceptional
This excellent story transcends the bounds of "thriller" and goes into deeper territory where morality, honour, truth and duty all come under scrutiny. Apparently written using incidents culled from the author's own experiences while a Reuters correspondent and put on paper as a sort of catharsis, the tautness of the storyline and the evocative writing elevate The Monkey House to the front-rank. It reminded me strongly of of (long-forgotten) Geoffrey Household in its intensity of evocation of atmosphere and the best of Le Carre in plotting.

The basic tenet of the story is very simple: how does an honourable man cope when the world descends into madness around him? and what does that honourable man do if he is a policeman investigating murders when almost everyone else in his whole world is busily engaged in the legitimated murder of civil warfare?

John Fullerton has written an exceptional book with a story based in one of the nastiest of modern conflicts but drawing out a timeless morality of the Good Man.

This book was published three years before Dan Fesperman's much-lauded "Lie in the Dark" and deals with much the same themes -- but in superior writing, to my mind

the real thing
Gritty, realistic...this is the Afghanistan and the Afghans the way they really are. A fast, well-written thriller with loads of action and some nasty surprises. But under the escapism, there is a strong moral/political message. This gets a rare five stars.