Yalta Boulevard Quintet
3 primary works • 4 total works
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.
