The stolen heart

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. (May)

A novice investigator faces more crimes to solve in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. This second novel in a series returns to Kyiv in 1919. Less dramatic and violent than its predecessor,The Silver Bone (2024), it portrays a still uncertain but maturing Samson Kolechko in the early days of his career as an improbable police investigator. This time, alongside defrocked priest Sergius Kholodny, he's pursuing participants in the illegal trade of meat, a precious commodity in a city plagued by material deprivation, whose inhabitants subsist, at best, on pork fat and pies filled with animal intestines. Under constant pressure from his commander, Nayden, and shadowed by Abyazov, an emissary from the Cheka, the dreaded secret police, Samson pursues his investigation fitfully, guided mainly by information he receives from Moses Briskin, the suspected meat dealer who's hauled from detention for periodic interrogations. A series of thefts from police offices also divert the investigators for a time. Samson finds himself in a deepening relationship with Nadezhda, employed by the Provincial Bureau of Statistics, who's imperiled by her involvement in a census of railway workers. They seamlessly, and appealingly, make the transition from roommates to awkward romantic partners. Samson remains haunted by the memory of the Cossack attack that took his father's life and cost him his right ear, retaining the severed body part in a tin of sweets in his flat. For all the bleakness of its characters' lives, the novel has some lighter moments, like the training session that instructs Samson and Kholodny on the proper technique for blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of interrogation subjects. Though the stakes here are not as high as in its predecessor, Samson is a companionable protagonist who manages to seem both part of the nascent political system and at a slight remove from it, and this story's conclusion lays the groundwork for future adventures in his grim, but intriguing, world. A welcome return to post-revolutionary Kyiv for another police procedural featuring fledgling investigator Samson Kolechko. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.