Andrey Kurkov is often called Ukraine’s greatest living writer, and it is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre. (Read “Death and the Penguin” and its sequels — they are a delight.) His newly translated book, THE SILVER BONE (HarperVia, 291 pp., $28), is the first in a fine new series set in Kyiv in 1919.
Samson Kolechko barely escapes with his life — though he does lose his right ear — when a Cossack murders his father with a saber. Orphaned, jobless and forced to relinquish his apartment to Red Army soldiers, Samson’s options seem limited. But then the local police force recruits him, and almost immediately he finds himself sucked into a murder case, parsing clues that involve a custom-tailored suit and a giant bone made of silver.
Kurkov, as filtered through the supple translation of Boris Dralyuk, infuses “The Silver Bone” with wry humor as Samson investigates his case while succumbing to the charms of a statistician named Nadezhda. A sequel is set to arrive next year.
Kristen Perrin’s debut novel, HOW TO SOLVE YOUR OWN MURDER (Dutton, 368 pp., $28), arrives with fanfare and flash, but it’s one of the odder first efforts I’ve read lately. Don’t get me wrong, I rather liked it, but when I got to the page where one of the main characters declared that “the cleverness pulsing through me is so strong that I don’t even cringe at my sudden over-the-top attempts to speak like a lawyer,” I braced myself for some contorted storytelling.
After a fortuneteller at a country fair told a teenager, Frances Adams, in 1965 that “all signs point to your murder,” she lived under this macabre prediction for decades, becoming “a weird old lady with a huge country house and piles of money, just digging up dirt on anyone who crosses her path in case they might turn out to be her murderer.” When Frances summons her great-niece Annie to her estate, the girl arrives only to find her dead on the floor, next to some white roses studded with needles. Frances has left a note: “I leave my estate — the entirety of it, including the funds in all my accounts — to the person who successfully solves my murder.”
The plot’s shakiness is redeemed by both Annie, a caring young woman thrust into a strange game she should never have played, and Frances, who — through flashbacks — slowly reveals the real mystery at the novel’s heart. You’ll need to be patient, but the payoff in the final pages is worth it.
Brendan Flaherty’s THE DREDGE (Atlantic Monthly Press, 240 pp., $26) is of a quieter pitch, but don’t let that fool you: Flaherty writes with stealthy acuity, his prose seemingly simple yet full of coiled power. “You don’t know some people, and then you do, and then you don’t.”
Driving the narrative is the estrangement of the Casey brothers, living separate lives like wounded pugilists in opposite corners. Cale fled their rural Connecticut hometown for Hawaii, making money selling luxury real estate. Ambrose remained, started a family and opened his own construction company. They share a secret dating to their teenage years, a time of violence and instability. And it involves the local pond that’s about to be dredged, all these decades later, in a project overseen by the contractor Lily Rowe. She has secrets of her own.
The plot exists only as scaffolding to explore the ties binding Cale, Ambrose, Lily and others — living as well as dead. Multiple hauntings emerge in “The Dredge,” and you’ll be contemplating them after the last page.
Finally, I’m late to the historical mystery novels of Deanna Raybourn, which sparkle with wit and vigor and feminist-forward thinking. A GRAVE ROBBERY (Berkley, 326 pp., $28) is the ninth to feature the Victorian-era adventuress and butterfly hunter Veronica Speedwell, who solves crimes with the nature historian Stoker, who is also her lover and sparring partner.
Here the duo investigate a particularly brazen and gruesome affair that begins with the discovery that a wax mannequin figure is actually a dead young woman, expertly preserved, her skin glowing like “gilded alabaster with a rosy hue.”
Veronica in particular is taken with “the Beauty,” as she dubs the girl, and is determined to find out who she was and how she died, even though Stoker balks at first. (As he tells her later, “Veronica, I have learnt well enough the futility of attempting to dissuade you when you are bent upon a course of action.”)
Throw in an assortment of delightful side characters and an engaging tamarin monkey, and what you have is the very definition of a gleeful romp.
