Gerhard Roth Der Berg (Balkan Quest) S.Fischer Verlag, 2000, 310 pp. ISBN 3-10-066612-7 Take a touch of James Bond, a pinch of Philip Marlowe, and more than a dash of the incompetence of 'The Liquidator', and you came near to approaching the character of Viktor Gartner, the Austrian journalist whose adventures occupy this book. Demoted from his job as a political reporter, he is told to go off and write a travelogue about Greece. Instead, he uses his time to search for a Serbian writer, who, he believes, was a witness of the Srebrenica massacre during the war in Bosnia and may now be hiding in a monastery on Mount Athos. His first intended informant is a Serbian academic working on the staff of the University of Thessalonika. He arrives at this man's office only, unfortunately, to find that he has been murdered. Other potential contacts are almost equally disappointing. An attempt to reach Mount Athos by boat is not a success, and though he gets there in the end he is soon arrested and kicked out of Greece. And in fact his quarry, known as Goran R, has now moved on to Istanbul. The elusive Serbian agrees to a meeting, which is to take place in a car. But before any useful information can be exchanged his would-be inquisitor is dragged unceremoniously from the vehicle and deported from Turkey on information from the Greek police which, enemies though they are, the Turkish authorities feel they must act upon. Despite these misadventures, Gartner is praised by his editor for finding the Serb, whom the media had reported as dead, but by now he has had enough. Disdaining the accolade, he decides to go to the cinema, where images and dreams take the precedence they deserve. This is not an overly political work, despite its subject, still less a moral crusade. Its message, if any, concerns the gap between appearance and reality. Above all, however it is an entertaining page-turner - and our hero is even allowed to get the girl.