Death of the Red Rider: A Leningrad Confidential - Softcover

Yakovleva, Yulia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782276807 ISBN 13: 9781782276807

Verlag: Pushkin Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Yakovleva pick[s] up the torch from Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series". -- The New York Times

"A superb read, with some unexpected turns right at the end." -- Crime Book of the Month, The Critic

"Fascinating reading. . . This series has legs!" -- Publishers Weekly

On the eve of Soviet purges, Detective Zaitsev returns to solve the murder of a Red Army horseman -- the second installment in the ultimate noir detective series

Perfect for fans of thrilling historical crime fiction, Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels, and Lara Prescott's The Secrets We Kept

As the Red Terror gathers pace, a horseman and horse mysteriously collapse in the middle of a race in Leningrad. Weary Detective Zaitsev, still raw from his last brush with the Party, is dispatched to the Soviet state cavalry school in Novocherkassk, southern Russia, to investigate. As he witnesses the horror of the Holodomor, and the impact of Soviet collectivisation, he struggles to penetrate the murky, secretive world of the cavalry school.

Why has this particular murder attracted so much attention from Soviet officials? Zaitsev needs to answer this question and solve the case before the increasingly paranoid authorities turn their attention towards him...

Don't miss the second installment in the atmospheric and relentlessly dark detective series set in Stalinist Russia, where corruption, informers, and purges take paranoia to the next level.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yulia Yakovleva is a writer, theatre and ballet critic, and playwright. She is particularly known for two types of historical fiction set in Stalin-era Leningrad: the award-winning children's chapter book series The Leningrad Tales that confront Soviet history, and the thrilling series of detective novels about Leningrad police investigator Vasily Zaitsev that began with Punishment of a Hunter. Yakovleva received her MA from School of Creative Arts of the University of Hertfordshire. She lives in Oslo, Norway, with her husband and son.

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp translates literature from Arabic, German and Russian into English. Her work has been shortlisted for many prestigious prizes including the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.

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Prologue  
 
The city always looked good in the early, gentle summer sun.
The grey, withered houses across the street had something light and papery about them.
His cobbler’s shack was warming up fast. The window panes bloomed with dusty smudges and stains; you couldn't see much of the passers-by. It was getting stuffy inside. He nudged the bolt, and gave the door a shove. The ‘OPEN’ sign hit the glass with a bounce, then swayed to and fro. A young man on the pavement outside jumped out of the way, narrowly avoiding a collision by the door.
“Hey, watch it, old man!,” he said with a laugh, his hand up to stop the rattling glass pane in the door.
‘Old man?’ he thought of objecting as he stuck his head round the door, but instead he just looked on as the young man walked off. He noticed the cheeky sod was wearing canvas plimsolls – summer shoes already. They slapped the ground as he stepped. Cheerful shoes. Young.
The Nevsky breeze fanned his head.
The cobbler looked at the sun, squinted, and grumpily slinked back into his shack. A chewed-up old boot with a broken heel was gripped in the vice, heel up. A heap of other patients of every size and colour lay beneath the bench, giving off a faint but persistent smell of unwashed feet. Citizens left them to be repaired in winter, picked them up in summer.
He poked around with his awl. The heel was beyond saving. Not much left of the boot, either. You only had to touch the leather and it crumbled. They used to throw them away when they got to this state.
Oh, that’s how things used to be. What didn’t he know about those boots and their owners? How things were before.
‘Old man’! How is he an old man? He wasn’t offended. Because it wasn’t true. You could perhaps say ‘on the other side of fifty’.
And this street – curse it, what was it called again? Volodarsky. No – Liteiny! Ah, Liteiny! How the lamps used to flicker, the lamps in front of the well-to-do tenement houses. Ah, how it used to be. When the fiery trotters used to fly by beneath the blue nets. Used to.
He had his bachelor quarters right here next door. A small dwelling – he’d never been rich. They used to gather of an evening, the chaps from his regiment. And the ladies... Ah, the short-lived moths of the demi-monde. She had chestnut hair. Watery, Arabian eyes, as they say. How did people describe beautiful women? He had no idea. He was afraid of them. Since that dreadful business … since those events, it was like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Describing a mare, though... that was another matter. Smooth neck. Short withers. Firm in the back and the loins. Correct stature. Relatively low croup. What was her name? Grief? Sorrow? Daughter of Silver Wind and Mettle. Everything comes back to you, everything, if you just start remembering. And Mettle – whose daughter was she?
He looked up from his work. But the windows of the houses across the street didn’t give anything away. They looked back blindly like the mole-eyed gaze of a shabby old St Petersburg demi-mondaine. They no longer remembered a thing. Former apartments had become communal flats: ten rooms for ten families, shared bathroom, shared toilet, shared kitchen, shared filth. Those houses now even smelled of urine and putrid flesh, like destitute old crones who had let themselves go.
And passers-by stomped along the street, shuffled past, clattered past. Indistinguishable in their black, grey, brown, in their dusty, trampled-down, self-absorbed insignificance. The socks, the soles, the heels. Never anything in the slightest bit elegant, nimble, flirtatious... He tutted at himself for this new habit of looking at people’s shoes first. So Soviet. So Volodarsky! He tried looking up. At their faces. But the faces that floated by were no different to the shoes.
He went back to his work. He gripped the heel with the claw of a hammer, slapped the handle with his palm, and yanked the heel off.
There was a tap on the glass.
And again – cursed habit! – he looked at the shoes first. A lacquered toe stepped onto the threshold of his shack. In wafted a sweet and fuggy smell. A receipt was shoved under his nose. He took it, and peered through his glasses as he studied the lilac scrawl. He checked it against the shelf. He handed the slip back.
“They’re not ready.”
“What do you mean, they’re not ready?”
The shoes were new, not even a crease, but her feet were broad, her face pale. And the new hat didn’t help. An ordinary, simple woman. Commoner. Nothing made a difference with their kind! Never mind all their Death to Husbands fashion houses, and closed distributors, and coupons from their high-ranking husbands, and torgsin hard currency stores, and what have you. The class hegemony.
“They’re not ready.”
He tried to nudge the door shut. The lacquered toes wouldn’t let him. A robust hand rested on the door. Soft physique, with some lines of fat, he noted with his professional, judgmental eye. They used to cull mares like that. 
“They should have been ready yesterday!” the woman squealed. “You scum, you wretch. Do it now, then! I’m not going anywhere until it’s done! I'll show you! You’ll be coughing blood when I’m done with you!”
This invective poured from her painted mouth. A red ‘o’, typed in bold.
He had seen her kind a million times before. He wasn't afraid of them. He calmly flipped over the sign: ‘Closed’. He took off his apron. He nudged the woman with his shoulder as he pushed past her, out of the shop. He demonstratively glanced at his watch. Right under her nose, he hooked the padlock in place, and snapped it shut. Then he walked down Liteiny Prospekt. Gah, bloody Volodarsky! Her cursing flew in his direction, but couldn’t keep up with him.
The good thing about being a cobbler was you had no need of fear. There was always work to be found. And you could hardly sink any lower.
 
 
The stairs had gotten shabby, as had all of St Petersburg over the course of the Soviet period. But even this grotty staircase – disfigured by the housekeeper's paint on the walls, with its threadbare carpet and dirty footprints – remained a truly St Petersburg staircase. He slowed his pace. Closed his eyes. Amazing.
Climbing these stairs, he always had the feeling that he wasn’t going upstairs to the second floor, but emerging from water. And this water washed away everything: Volodarsky Prospekt, his shack, the Soviet jargon, the Soviet ways of doing things, the nastiness, the despair, the longing. When he stepped onto the second floor landing, he was back as he was before: an older version, but a fit and lean, retired lieutenant of the N Regiment. A connoisseur of racehorses.
He preferred to think of himself as lean. Not scrawny.
The door to the apartment opened almost immediately. It was as if Alexander Afanasyevich had been there waiting. They exchanged smiles. They silently walked along a dark corridor cluttered with old things, trunks and washbasins. They passed the doors behind which his neighbours lived. Alexander Afanasyevich let him into his room. For half a second, the murmur of conversation swashed through the doorway, that indistinct muddle of laughter, clinging and clattering, knocking and rustling that accompanies a dinner party. Then the door was closed again to keep in all those lovely sounds. There was the soft squelch of the rubber door seal on all four edges of the doorway.
The feast was already joyfully well under way.
He received a warm welcome from everyone....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pushkin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782276807
• ISBN 13: 9781782276807
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 396
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland