Publishers Weekly
★ 01/29/2024
A Kyiv torn to pieces by WWI provides the backdrop for this fascinating series launch from Ukrainian novelist and screenwriter Kurkov (Grey Bees). The action begins with teenage Samson Kolechko seeing his father cut down in the street by Soviet Cossacks, followed by a saber slice to Samson’s head that severs his right ear. Alone and stunned, he takes shelter in his family’s apartment, only to find two Red Army soldiers quartered there. He files a report about the soldiers’ misdeeds, including the unwelcome removal of Samson’s father’s furniture. The eloquence of the report’s language impresses the local police investigator, who offers Samson a job “combat crime and restor order,” which he accepts. Bolstering Samson even further is a budding romance with strong-minded yet tender statistician Nadezhda. After a tailor friend and a soldier are both murdered, Samson leads an investigation into the crimes, discovering evidence including an incredibly large suit and a silver bone as long as a femur at the scenes. Kurkov eschews conventional mystery plotting—the eponymous bone isn’t discovered until two-thirds of the way through the novel—but the finely drawn characters and harrowing descriptions of daily life in 1919 Kyiv leave a far more lasting impression than clever genre tricks ever could. With its earthy prose and stunning attention to detail, this stands apart. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
A very intriguing and atmospheric novel by a highly accomplished writer. ... [The Silver Bone] is a fascinating read in the light of contemporary events.” — Alexander McCall Smith, Bestselling Author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
"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." — New York Times
"A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux . . . I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more." — The Guardian
"[The Silver Bone is a] fascinating series launch ... the finely drawn characters and harrowing descriptions of daily life in 1919 Kyiv leave a far more lasting impression than clever genre tricks ever could. With its earthy prose and stunning attention to detail, this stands apart." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A gripping whodunnit with surrealist flourishes ... Kurkov brings to life an overlooked and much-contested episode in Ukrainian history, capturing the brutality with which Soviet forces first attempted to establish control over the city." — Washington Post
“Rich and compulsive, a modern classic in the making.” — Anna Bailey, author of Where the Truth Lies
"Original and intriguing. Relocates the historical crime novel somewhere between Kafka and The Twilight Zone." — Frank Tallis, Author of Death in Vienna and Vienna Blood
"In the tradition of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther ... Kurkov sets crime-solving against the chaos of a turbulent era — for his Samson Kolechko, the upheaval of Ukraine in 1919, when Cossacks, the Red Army and their White opponents, and even Chinese Communists battled in streets of a Kiev darkened by power failure ... [The Silver Bone] poses haunting moral questions about defending order in perilous days, questions that reverberate a century later in Ukraine and around the world." — David O. Stewart, Award-winning Historian and Author of The Lincoln Deception
"Mix[ing] elements of grim humor and surrealism ... [The Silver Bone is] a winning offbeat crime novel that begs for a sequel" — Library Journal
"An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case." — Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
02/01/2024
Ukrainian author Kurkov's (Grey Bees) new novel, set in 1919 Kyiv, mixes elements of grim humor and surrealism. It's a far-from-straightforward policier, as though Gogol, Bulgakov, Ilf, and Petrov had been thrown into the mix. In the novel's first sentence, Samson hears a Cossack saber hit his father's head, splitting it in half. Then a saber slices off one of Samson's ears. Here reality fragments. The ear still hears and transmits what it hears to Samson, as the two Red Army soldiers who have commandeered his flat plan his death. (With Samson dead, they can desert the army.) When Samson tries to report them, he's conscripted into the Kyiv police force to investigate a murder involving a stolen bolt of fine cloth that the tailor from whom it was stolen refuses to take back. Then Samson's partner is killed and he vows vengeance. Along the way, he meets a stolid Soviet damsel; love ensues, sweetly and modestly. Eventually he finds the killer, identified by the pattern of the cloth laid out by the tailor—bulky top, spindly legs. One will never feel uncomfortable en route through this admittedly complicated story whose Kyiv is a complicated place to survive. VERDICT A winning offbeat crime novel that begs for a sequel.—David Keymer
MAY 2024 - AudioFile
Josh Bloomberg's narration is a fine match of text and voice. The tumultuous events that took place in Kyiv/Kiev during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) are interwoven throughout this exciting historical mystery by Kurkov, who has been called Ukraine's most celebrated novelist. The story concerns a young engineer turned police detective named Samson Kolechko and his investigation of two murders, a mysterious silver femur, and a strange tailored garment. Add to this a budding romance with one Nadezhda, and the entire story is quite delightful. Bloomberg uses credible Ukrainian/Russian/German accents for the dialogue. His inflections and pacing are all perfect. This is supposed to be the first installment of a series, and one hopes that Bloomberg will narrate the future installments. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-12-06
Murder in Kyiv in the Bolshevik Revolution’s aftermath.
In the first of a projected series, the prominent Ukrainian novelist Kurkov introduces Samson Kolechko, an unemployed electrical engineer who lands a detective job in 1919, launching him into the investigation of a theft that evolves into the pursuit of a murderer that almost claims his life. After his father is slaughtered in the street by Cossack marauders and his own right ear is severed in the attack, Samson finds himself isolated in his Kyiv flat until some of his space is appropriated by two Red Army soldiers. When he reports their theft of his father’s beloved desk to the local police station, he’s improbably offered a job as a detective to help stem the tide of property crimes in a city that’s roiled by violence in the unsettled aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. With relative swiftness but no small amount of personal peril, Samson follows a trail that eventually leads to the discovery of a theft of silver objects, including the eponymous body part, after he survives an ambush and is nearly murdered alongside a soldier who’d been assisting him and a witness in the case. He’s aided in his pursuit of their killer by his friendship with Nadezhda, a young woman who works in Kyiv’s census office and has become the object of Samson’s romantic interest. Kurkov deepens his story with a vivid portrait of Kyiv that emphasizes the city’s “atmosphere of fear and danger” and considerable material deprivation in the wake of Russia’s epochal political change. Samson and his colleagues must function in what amounts to a barter economy that involves frequent nighttime blackouts caused by the theft of the firewood fueling Kyiv’s power plant, along with food and water shortages. It’s a bleak, but fitting, backdrop to one man’s grimly determined quest for justice.
An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.
