Eastern Europe Thrillers
5 primary works
Book 1
It's August, 1948, three years after the Russians "liberated" the nation from German Occupation. But the Red Army still patrols the capital's rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories. Twenty-two-year-old Detective Emil Brod finally gets his chance to serve his country, investigating murder for the People's Militia. The first victim is a state songwriter, but the facts point to a political motive. Emil would like to investigate further, but his colleagues in Homicide are suspicious or silent: He is on his own in this new, dangerous world. "The Bridge of Sighs" launches a unique series of crime novels featuring a cast of characters in an ever-evolving landscape, the politically volatile terrain of Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century. "The Bridge of Sighs" is a 2004 Edgar Award Nominee for Best First Novel.
Book 2
Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar, a proletariat writer in addition to a state militia homicide detective, is a man on the brink. Estranged from his wife, whom he believes is cheating on him with one of his colleagues, and frustrated by writer's block, Ferenc's attention is focused on his job. But his job is increasingly political, something that makes him profoundly uncomfortable. When Ferenc is asked to look into the disappearance of a party member's wife and discovers that she might have run away from her abusive husband, he wishes he could do anything but return her to him. At the same time, the militia officers are pressed into service policing a demonstration, one that Ferenc might rather be participating in, and he refuses. These two situations, coupled with an investigation into the murder of a painter by a man recently released from the camps, brings Ferenc closer to danger than ever before-from himself, from his superiors, from the capital's shadowy criminal element.
Book 3
Book 4
The personal becomes political in the latest in Steinhauer's award-nominated, acclaimed Eastern European crime series. The year is 1975, and one of the People's Militia homicide investigators is on a plane out of the capital, bound for Istanbul. The plane is hijacked by Armenian terrorists, but before the Turkish authorities can fulfill their demands, the plane explodes in midair. Two investigators, a secret policeman and a homicide detective, are assigned to the case. Both believe that their superiors are keeping them in the dark, but they can't figure out why. Until they learn that everything is connected to a seven-year-old murder, a seemingly insignificant killing that has had far-reaching consequences. The politics and history for which Olen Steinhauer's novels have been most praised turn intimate and highly compelling in this new novel, reminiscent of the best of John le Carre.
Book 5
The revolutionary politics and chaotic history of life inside Olen Steinhauer's fictionalized Eastern European country have made his literary crime series, with its two Edgar Award nominations along with other critical acclaim, one of today's most acclaimed. Finally having reached the tumultuous 1980s, the series comes full circle as one of the earliest cases of the People's Militia reemerges to torment all of the inspectors, including Emil Brod, now the chief, who was the original detective on the case. His arrest of one of the country's revolutionary leaders in the late 1940s resulted in the politician's conviction and imprisonment, but Emil was too young in those days to understand what it meant to go up against someone so powerful--and win. Only now, in 1989, when he is days from retirement and spends more time looking over his shoulder than ahead, does he realize that what he did may get him--and others--killed. Told against the backdrop of the crumbling forty-year-old government--with the leaders who were so new in the series debut, "The Bridge of Sighs"--"Victory Square"""is Steinhauer at his best. Once again he masterfully makes crime fiction both personal and political, combining a story of revenge at any cost with a portrait of a country on the brink of collapse.