DEATH OF THE RED RIDER, The Leningrad Confidential series #2

DEATH OF THE RED RIDER
YULIA YAKOVLEVA (The Leningrad Confidential series #2) (tr. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp) Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: As the Red Terror gathers pace, a horseman and horse mysteriously collapse in the middle of a race in Leningrad. Weary Detective Zaitsev, still raw from his last brush with the Party, is dispatched to the Soviet state cavalry school in Novocherkassk, southern Russia, to investigate. As he witnesses the horror of the Holodomor, and the impact of Soviet collectivisation, he struggles to penetrate the murky, secretive world of the cavalry school.

Why has this particular murder attracted so much attention from Soviet officials? Zaitsev needs to answer this question and solve the case before the increasingly paranoid authorities turn their attention towards him...

Don’t miss the second installment in the atmospheric and relentlessly dark detective series set in Stalinist Russia, where corruption, informers, and purges take paranoia to the next level.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Less gray-skied than Punishment of a Hunter, just as paranoid, just as nail-bitingly intense. The action moving south of Leningrad to "Cossack country," a nomenclatural sidestep from the modern name of a place Little Vladdy Pu-Pu doesn't much like having mentioned at present, changes the externals and, if anything, ramps up the internal conflicts between self and State present in every single breath taken in Stalinist times.

Zaitsev has a new...comrade? minder? internal spy?...in Zoya, a woman with a chip on her shoulder about being judged unfairly (because woman), a woman with a difficult attitude of disrespect for the people among whom she and Zaitsev must do their investigative job, and a general poor substitute for last book's Nefyodov. When you're among people who are extra-suspicious of you because you're Russian when they were already unhappy to see someone sent by the central authorities to poke around in places they'd just as soon leave unpoked, thanks, to solve a crime that took place a world away, to someone whose life was a-rattle with the skeletons in his closet...this will not end well for plenty of folks.

It's heavenly!

No one can be trusted! About/with/for ANYthing! Every time Zaitsev finds something out he has to unwrap more shades of meanings than Tut had embalmers' bandages! Impressively, Author Yakovleva manages to make the thriller-y bits cohere well. There's a secondary theme in who was murdered, where, and why, though it's not particularly energetically explored. It very much comes with the murdered man's identity, and I found it and its deeper ramifications interesting, but if I don't holler about it the importance won't be obvious to most. And I won't. This series has, as one of its main pleasures, the pressure cooker of Zaitsev sweating out the clues, in the teeth of multiple prongs of opposition, while uncovering realities of his life lived in Soviet Russia that break him on a human level.

So my attention was riveted again...last book I gave an extra quarter-star to, elevating it almost to fivehood. Not this one, despite my praising it; so why?

As pleasure reading, deeply interesting history of the Red Terror is...challenging. The information Zaitsev discovers as his investigation goes on would've gotten him shot in 1937 Russia. He could not have survived learning what he did...too much evidence to the contrary exists in the identities of the many murdered. So my disbelief muscle was sore from overuse. Also, why didn't he just shove Zoya under a tram or into a combine harvester and have done with it? She was more than a poor partner for an investigator, she was a provocatively bad investigator herself.

So there's the missing fractional star. Noe of that made me less eager to get to the next chapter, and I could not wait to pick up the read every day.

So a big #WITMonth win for Pushkin Vertigo, and me; y'all, too, if you go get one now.