The Stolen Heart
The Kyiv Mysteries
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- CHF 7.50
Beschreibung des Verlags
Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case - though it is mostly perplexing because it's hard to understand why selling the meat of one's own pig constitutes a crime.
But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to "reinforce" the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent - if diffident - best.
Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancée Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she's carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it's no wonder the "meat case" takes a back seat.
But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson's fate lies - and Nadezhda's too, for the two are inextricably entwined.
Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
Reviews for The Silver Bone - Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
"Andrey Kurkov is often called Ukraine's greatest living writer, and it is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre" New York Times
"Wildly enjoyable . . . A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux . . . I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more" Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novice Ukrainian police investigator Samson Kolechko scrambles to track down his missing fiancée in Kurkov's extraordinary sequel to The Silver Bone. In post-WWI Kyiv, sensitive Samson's new job gives him a solid chance of surviving his "restless, dangerous, and hungry" era, but his empathy for his fellow man often threatens to get him fired. Though Samson and his colleague, ex-priest Kholodny, are charged with investigating illegal meat sales, Samson is bewildered that peasants turning intestines into pies are breaking the law. He reluctantly carries out his duties anyway, until he learns that his fiancée, Nadezhda, has vanished while interviewing railway workers as part of her job at the Bureau of Statistics. Horrified, Samson launches a desperate inquiry, and soon discovers that two other women have gone missing under similar circumstances. To find them, he joins forces with the harsh, violent Nikanor Abyazov, a Chekist officer who relishes his government-given authority. Kurkov captures the atmosphere of 1920s Kyiv with terse, poetic prose, and punctuates his crackerjack plot with gorgeous, Proustian reflections on Samson's childhood and deceased family members. Distinguished by its humor, heart, and subtle political urgency, this series deserves a long life.
