The Stolen Heart

A second case for Samson Kolecho in war-torn, revolutionary Kyiv. By the author of the International Booker Prize-longlisted The Silver Bone 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 Drayluk