Böcker av Leonid Yuzefovich

The year is 1871. Prince von Ahrensburg, Austria's military attaché to St. Petersburg, has been killed in his own bed. The murder threatens diplomatic consequences for Russia so dire that they could alter the course of history. Leading the investigation into the high-ranking diplomat's death is Chief Inspector Ivan Putilin, but the Tsar has also called in the notorious Third Department - the much-feared secret police - on the suspicion that the murder is politically motivated. As the clues accumulate, the list of suspects grows longer; there are even rumors of a werewolf at large in the capital.Suspicion falls on the diplomat's lover and her cuckolded husband, as well as Russian, Polish and Italian revolutionaries, not to mention Turkish spies. True to his maxim that "coincidence and passion are the real conspirators," Putilin seeks answers inside the diplomatic circus as well, which leads him to struggles with criminals and with the secret police itself. When the mystery is solved, the only person who saw it coming was Putilin.

Imagine St. Petersburg in the end of the 19th century. In the absurd and gloomy atmosphere of the tsarist Russia's old capital - where rumours spread faster than a wolf runs along Nevsky Prospect - Ivan Putilin, a crafty local detective, takes on a case of a notorious foreign diplomat murder. These are the settings of a masterfully stylised retro-detective story Harlequin's Costume by Leonid Yuzefovich, the first volume in a series whose hero is based on the real-life Ivan Putilin, the Chief of St. Petersburg Police 1866-1892. Present novel, brilliantly translated by Marian Schwartz, revolves around the real murder case taken by the author from the diaries of the famous detective. The beauty of this book is in the fact that it's up to the reader to find out who is who in this "e;Dostoevskian"e; city and as it is told by famous Russian critic Leo Danilkin: "e;Sieving through the text and separating the truth from the literature in it is the real pleasure derived from Yuzefovich's work."e;***Thistitlehasbeenrealisedbyateamofthefollowingdedicatedprofessionals: Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz,MaximHodak- N (Publisher),MaxMendor- N N (Director),YanaKovalskaya andCamillaStein.