The Stolen Heart

<p><b>Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case - though it is mostly perplexing because it's hard to understand why selling the meat of one's own pig constitutes a crime. </b><br><br>But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to "reinforce" the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent - if diffident - best.<br><br>Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancée Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she's carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it's no wonder the "meat case" takes a back seat.<br><br>But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson's fate lies - and Nadezhda's too, for the two are inextricably entwined.<br><br><b>Translated from the Russian by Boris Drayluk</b><br><br><b>Reviews for <i>The Silver Bone</i> - Longlisted for the International Booker Prize</b><br><br>"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" <i>New York Times</i><br><br>"Wildly enjoyable . . . A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux . . . I finished <i>The Silver Bone</i> wishing to read more" <b><i>Guardian</i><br><br></b></p>