The Lost Soldiers : A Novel

The difficulty of solving crimes in a war-ravaged city is at the core of Ukrainian novelist Kurkov's excellent third mystery featuring novice police investigator Samson Kolechko (after The Stolen Heart). It's 1919, and Bolsheviks have a precarious hold on power across Ukraine. Samson is ordered to investigate the inexplicable disappearance of 100 Red Army soldiers who vanished from a bathhouse without their clothes or their rifles. Not only is it a bizarre and baffling case, but Samson receives little cooperation from bathhouse workers and endures intense pressure from his superiors to solve it quickly. The pace of the investigation picks up as Samson seeks sources from the streets of Kyiv, including a poet who writes about the corrupt and violent city. Kurkov excels at capturing the profound political instability of war-torn Kyiv, where citizens walk around with three forms of currency in their pockets: czarist kopecks, Kerensky rubles, and Soviet rubles. These details, and lingering questions about whether daily life under such circumstances might snuff out Samson's tenderness, deepen the tension of the impossible crime at the novel's core. This series continues to impress. (May)