EU: What do Brussels bureaucrats think about all day? Some, perhaps, spend each waking moment contemplating a votive image of Jean Monnet as they consider how best to realise his dream of ever-closer union.
Others, according to popular myth, devote their time to thinking up new ways of interfering in European citizens' lives or tightening up the rules harmonising standards for ballpoint pens.
Mr Joseph Buckley, a Commission official dealing with structural funds, has more exciting things on his mind. When he leaves his office at lunchtime to snatch a sandwich near the Rond Point Schuman, Mr Buckley sees beyond the smartly dressed, grim-faced officials and lawyers around him into a hidden world of murder, blackmail and high-level fraud.
A native of Straffan, Co Kildare, Mr Buckley has drawn on his experience as an EU trade investigator to write a fast-paced thriller set in Brussels, the Far East and the United States. Mr Buckley's book, When Duty Calls, written under the pseudonym J.L. Kramer, has already won praise from such figures as the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, Ireland's EU Commissioner, Mr David Byrne, and Mr Michael Smurfit.
But don't let that put you off. An intricate plot involves the triads, Enron-style corporate fraud and the high-tech world of Silicon Valley. The trade investigator hero's adventures even take him to Dublin.
But it is Mr Buckley's portrayal of Brussels's European quarter as a hotbed of vice, violence and intrigue that is most striking. Shadowy agents emerge from the bushes in the Parc Cinquantenaire, where many Commission officials run at lunchtime. Rue Archimede, an apparently harmless street full of dull but otherwise innocent restaurants, takes on a new, sinister quality. Even the square outside The Irish Times office features as the scene of a mugging.
"There's an element of demystifying Brussels and showing that Eurocrats don't just shuffle papers," Mr Buckley said.
Mr Buckley's hero, the felicitously named Marc Schuman, sounds more charming and far better-looking than many Commission officials I have met. But the book successfully weaves essential information about the workings of the EU's corporate watchdog into a gripping tale. He even makes OLAF, the EU's rather tame fraud office, seem exciting.
Mr Buckley is not the first author to set a thriller in Brussels. Another Irish official at the Commission, Mr Derek Fee, set his novel, Cartel, in the city almost a decade ago. Britain's former foreign secretary, Mr Douglas Hurd, explored the gripping world of mergers and acquisitions in War Without Frontiers. Stanley Johnson's The Commissioner, about a commissioner drawn into a criminal conspiracy, was made into a film four years ago.
And June Goodfield's Rotten at the Core is the first in a trilogy of thrillers about fraud at the heart of EU institutions.
In a way, it should be no surprise that thriller writers should be drawn to the European capital for material. The city offers, among other things, international diplomacy, high finance, thousands of lawyers (some of whom must be a little shifty) and Belgium's curious, mysterious atmosphere.
Mr Buckley is at pains to point out that, being an extremely busy official, it has taken him years of his spare time to write his book. Displaying a level of initiative and entrepreneurship that is not usually associated with Brussels bureaucrats, he published the book himself.
With a keen eye, perhaps, to his future in the day job, Mr Buckley has kept most of his heroes inside the Commission and all his villains outside. But he has created a plausible world of intrigue in an unexpected setting. A walk through Parc Cinquantenaire will never feel the same again.