Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha.
A serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow, rattling the foundations of the communist state (such anti-social crimes only occur in decadent bourgeois societies, after all).
The victims are as pitifully innocent as the crimes are grievous, and Petrovka 38 runs down one blind alley after another, while its most capable detective, Pavel Matyushkin, is distracted by a frivolous apparatchik.
With twists and turns aplenty, and rich with the atmosphere of 1960s Moscow, The Latchkey Murders is a page-turner you won’t want to put down.
Alexei Bayer is a New York-based author, translator and, by economic necessity, an economist. He writes in English and in Russian, his native tongue, and translates into both languages. His short stories have been published in New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Chtenia.
The first novel in this series, Murder at the Dacha was published in 2013.
In an article for The Globalist, Bayer wrote about how he developed the protagonist, Pavel Matyushkin.
The murder of a poet is always more than a murder. When a famous writer is brutally stabbed on the campus of Moscow’s Lumumba University, the son of a recently deposed African president confesses, and the case assumes political implications that no one wants any part of.
KGB Chief Andropov has tapped Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso’s wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead.
Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.
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