My thanks, as ever, go to my agents Georgina Capel and Simon Shaps for their steadfast support and their faith in Balthazar Kovacs and his adventures. Thanks also to Rachel Conway and Irene Baldoni for all their help. It has been a pleasure to continue working with the team at Head of Zeus, especially my editors Nicolas Cheetham and Sophie Robinson. Their encouragement and their incisive comments were invaluable. Thanks also to Claire Kennedy, Rights Director, for securing multiple translation deals and to Louis Greenberg for his sharp copy-editing.
I remain grateful to the Society of Authors for its generous grant when I started writing District VIII, the first volume in the Balthazar Kovacs series. I am very pleased to be working with Kindle Entertainment, a London-based production company, as they develop a television series from the Balthazar Kovacs books. Special thanks to Ross Murray for his belief in Balthazar’s television potential, Steve Bailie for his creative ideas and to Melanie Stokes. Thanks also to the many friends and acquaintances who shared their knowledge of Budapest, Roma society, police matters and the city’s underworld. Readers wishing to learn more about Roma culture and society may visit the European Roma Rights Centre website at: errc.org. I am especially grateful to Clive Rumbold, a great lover of Budapest, for his insight and editorial suggestions and for sharing a chilling anecdote about the basement of a Buda villa. Special thanks to Monika Payne for her diligent reading of the first draft of Kossuth Square and her eagle-eyed list of suggestions and corrections, and also to Akos Gergely Balogh for his thoughts on District VIII. An honorary shout-out goes to Hannah Wood, my former editor at HarperCollins US, now at hannahwoodedit.com, who helped so much along the way with Kossuth Square. Last but not least, thanks, as ever, to Justin Leighton, Roger Boyes and Peter Green, fellow veterans of the ’hood.