Liberation Movements
A Novel
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4.0 • 40 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the author of New York Times bestseller The Tourist...
Olen Steinhauer's acclaimed literary crime series set in a fictional country in Eastern Europe began in the heady post--World War II era and has taken readers from the first noise of revolution through to the chaos of the 1960s and '70s.
The year is 1975, and one of the People's Militia homicide investigators is on a plane out of the capital, bound for Istanbul. The plane is hijacked by Armenian terrorists, but before the Turkish authorities can fulfill their demands, the plane explodes in midair.
Two investigators---Gavra Noukas, a secret policeman, and Katja Drdova, a homicide detective---are assigned to the case. Both believe that Brano Sev, their enigmatic superior and himself a career secret policeman, is keeping them in the dark both about the details of the case and all its players and about the true motives of their investigation, but they can't figure out why. That is, until they learn that everything is connected to a seven-year-old murder, a seemingly insignificant murder that has had far-reaching consequences.
The politics and history for which Olen Steinhauer's novels have been most praised turn intimate and highly compelling in this ambitious new novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Steinhauer's dazzling fourth book in his series about various police and intelligence agents in an unnamed Communist-era Eastern European country gives a large role to Brano Sev, the seriously conflicted spy who starred in the previous entry, 36 Yalta Boulevard (2005). Sev sums up the new book's theme when he says to a younger subordinate, "Intelligence work is precisely what it says it's about intelligence. We are not murderers." There's some irony here: we know that Sev has killed several people himself. But there's also an unexpected note of humanity, as Sev supervises the investigation by two junior agents of a murder in Russian-occupied Prague in 1968 that's later tied to a plane hijacked by Armenian terrorists on its way to Istanbul in 1975. Another new element is the Turkish capital, alive and yeasty compared to the drab, restricted home city of 36 Yalta Boulevard. And the emergence of a major female character a homicide investigator looking for personal justice shows how a skilled writer working at the top of his form can keep a series from faltering.
