Yuliya Yakovleva
Autore di Punishment of a Hunter
Sull'Autore
Serie
Opere di Yuliya Yakovleva
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Yakovleva, Yuliya
- Nome legale
- Яковлева, Юлия Юрьевна
Yakovleva, Yuliya Yurevna - Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- Russia
Utenti
Recensioni
Surviving in post Tsarist Russia 1930’s
A glimpse into the conditions, the harshness of Soviet Russia post the revolution as Leningrad Detective Vasily Zaitsev of the Criminal Investigation Department investigates the death of a trotting horse and its Red Army Cavalry rider. A death brought about by something unusual, strange even.
Filled with darting, often satirical commentary on the times, the novel is dark, brooding and at times savage, with moments of compassion. A time when the Red Terror is unleashed, the political purge by the Bolsheviks.
Zaitsev’s search takes him to Novocherkassk in Southern Russia where the Cavalry training school has suddenly been relocated. Is this a subterfuge, an effort to save the horses or something else?
An unasked for assistant, Comrade Zoya, is sent with him. She’s prickly and annoying. There’s more here than meets the eye. Is she checking up on him?
A train stop and confrontation with starving people, like wraiths appear out of the darkness, is a wake-up call. A man made famine, known as the Holodomor has gripped Russia.
Novocherkassk is supposedly in the growing part of Russia. What Detective Zaitsev finds is starvation and danger. People being forced to give up their prized possessions to those in charge. Whoever that might be!
Always in the back of Zaitsev’s mind is that he might be taken back for questioning by the Soviet Secret police.
Meanwhile back at his apartment his landlady seems to keep adding staff for him, although he pays little attention. She’s hired a cook for him, and a nanny? What?
Once more I felt like I was wading through despair and hopelessness and yet I’m sympathetic to Zaitsev and his plight. I feared his many dilemmas and enjoyed any breakthroughs.
Zaitsev is living dangerously in a time where the state turned child against parent and all was in flux.
A fine Russian noir historical detective novel!
A Pushkin Vertigo ARC via NetGalley.
Many thanks to the author and publisher.… (altro)
A glimpse into the conditions, the harshness of Soviet Russia post the revolution as Leningrad Detective Vasily Zaitsev of the Criminal Investigation Department investigates the death of a trotting horse and its Red Army Cavalry rider. A death brought about by something unusual, strange even.
Filled with darting, often satirical commentary on the times, the novel is dark, brooding and at times savage, with moments of compassion. A time when the Red Terror is unleashed, the political purge by the Bolsheviks.
Zaitsev’s search takes him to Novocherkassk in Southern Russia where the Cavalry training school has suddenly been relocated. Is this a subterfuge, an effort to save the horses or something else?
An unasked for assistant, Comrade Zoya, is sent with him. She’s prickly and annoying. There’s more here than meets the eye. Is she checking up on him?
A train stop and confrontation with starving people, like wraiths appear out of the darkness, is a wake-up call. A man made famine, known as the Holodomor has gripped Russia.
Novocherkassk is supposedly in the growing part of Russia. What Detective Zaitsev finds is starvation and danger. People being forced to give up their prized possessions to those in charge. Whoever that might be!
Always in the back of Zaitsev’s mind is that he might be taken back for questioning by the Soviet Secret police.
Meanwhile back at his apartment his landlady seems to keep adding staff for him, although he pays little attention. She’s hired a cook for him, and a nanny? What?
Once more I felt like I was wading through despair and hopelessness and yet I’m sympathetic to Zaitsev and his plight. I feared his many dilemmas and enjoyed any breakthroughs.
Zaitsev is living dangerously in a time where the state turned child against parent and all was in flux.
A fine Russian noir historical detective novel!
A Pushkin Vertigo ARC via NetGalley.
Many thanks to the author and publisher.… (altro)
There's something about reading a mystery novel in translation—assuming the translation is a good one. One gets swept up into a new culture and worldview as one gets swept up into the suspense and multiple leads of the plot. Punishment of a Hunter is just such a book. Written by a contemporary Russian author, but set in 1930s Leningrad, Punishment of a Hunter follows a mystery that is simultaneously bizarre and mundane.
1930s Leningrad is an uncomfortable place to spend time. No one is safe, the purges are ongoing, everyone is looking for someone to suffer in their stead or looking for a more bearable suffering from which there is still some hope of redemption.
The central character, Vaily Zeitsev is a member of the forces charged with investigating violent crime. At the same time, he's trying to help a coworker to avoid the purges and to avoid the purges himself. Higher-ups want a quick wrap-up to a murder. Zeitsev sees connections between that crime and a series of others that have drawn little official scrutiny. Zeitsev's colleagues have stopped trusting him, and his only ally (?) is someone he believes was planted in his unit to "discover" that Zeitsev is involved in incorrect political thought and/or has a bourgeois background.
Like many investigators, Zeitsev is unwilling to settle for the less-complex picture and the more-convenient solution. He wants to follow each and every thread of a complex criminal weaving, regardless of the price he'll pay for doing so.
If you enjoy historical and/or international mysteries, you're in for a real treat with Punishment of a Hunter. This is a book worth buying now—not a title to slowly wait to access until your name has risen to the top of your public library's request.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own.… (altro)
1930s Leningrad is an uncomfortable place to spend time. No one is safe, the purges are ongoing, everyone is looking for someone to suffer in their stead or looking for a more bearable suffering from which there is still some hope of redemption.
The central character, Vaily Zeitsev is a member of the forces charged with investigating violent crime. At the same time, he's trying to help a coworker to avoid the purges and to avoid the purges himself. Higher-ups want a quick wrap-up to a murder. Zeitsev sees connections between that crime and a series of others that have drawn little official scrutiny. Zeitsev's colleagues have stopped trusting him, and his only ally (?) is someone he believes was planted in his unit to "discover" that Zeitsev is involved in incorrect political thought and/or has a bourgeois background.
Like many investigators, Zeitsev is unwilling to settle for the less-complex picture and the more-convenient solution. He wants to follow each and every thread of a complex criminal weaving, regardless of the price he'll pay for doing so.
If you enjoy historical and/or international mysteries, you're in for a real treat with Punishment of a Hunter. This is a book worth buying now—not a title to slowly wait to access until your name has risen to the top of your public library's request.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own.… (altro)
A #Noirvember/#Booksgiving crossover!
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: The debut of the ultimate noir detective series: set in Stalinist Russia, riddled with corruption, informers, and purges that takes paranoia to the next level
MURDER
1930s Leningrad. Stalin is tightening his grip on the Soviet Union, and a mood of fear cloaks the city. Detective Vasily Zaitsev is tasked with investigating a series of bizarre and seemingly motiveless homicides.
MAYHEM
As the curious deaths continue, precious Old Master paintings start to disappear from the Hermitage collection. Could the crimes be connected?
MISTRUST
When Zaitsev sets about his investigations, he meets with obstruction at every turn. Soon even he comes under suspicion from the Soviet secret police.
The resolute detective must battle an increasingly dangerous political situation in his dogged quest to find the murderer―and stay alive.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: This is a newly translated series-starting thriller. I'm eager for the second one to appear, so go buy this one now.
Seriously. The only way the publisher knows there's a market is if there are sales, so go on now.
What do you mean, "but why should I?" Oh very well. Look at this image, of the same title as the book:
Doesn't that simply say it all in artistic form? And the painting's in the Hermitage collection in Russia, too.
The 1930s were a scary, scary time to be a Soviet citizen. The surveillance state's apparatus was risibly primitive by comparison to today's hypercapitalist surveillance model, but it was effective. Like those old Hitchcock movies where men in slouch-brimmed hats smoked on street corners by your apartment, the pervasive atmosphere was paranoid and terrified. (Our {great-}grandparents had more sense than we complacent and indifferent acquiescers do.) To be a policeman in a state-sponsored terrorist society, to be studied minutely as one tries to achieve the ever-elusive goal of bringing justice to transgressors while avoiding the political pitfalls of society's mad/badness, adds a layer of suspense to thrillers.
Author Yakovleva does a truly creditable and credible job with Zaitsev, her sleuth. He doesn't miraculously float above The System somehow, nor does he set out to provoke The System's minions to make his points. He falls victim to the excesses of the times (CW for torture!) and he still stubbornly insists on doing the right thing by the victims of personal violence. It is very much in the vein of the "lone truth-seeker" genre of thriller. I think those stories can go wrong quickly, turning into libertarian screeds against any and all forms of government by equating them with oppression. This book dodges that bullet by being about, explicitly taking as its subject, that nightmarish oppressive government and its warped and broken victim/citizens. I wish more libertarians would read this kind of historical take because it puts into a cold, unfriendly light the mild checks on their worst selves that so chafe them.
Author Yakovleva is ably assisted in telling her story by Translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. There are bursts of informative explanatory things in the text that I'm sure are her work...no one in modern Russia likely needs as much explanation of the role of the OGPU, for example (the domestic secret police, like the FBI or latter-Soviet-days KGB). That this information, among so much other information needed by Anglophone readers not Russophone ones, was woven into the text pretty darn seamlessly is a testament to Translator Kemp's grasp of and skill at presenting the reader the best version of the original text.
What makes it a perfect book to get your thriller reader giftee, or your thriller loving self, is that very thing: It's the best version of what was, if my Spidey-senses do not deceive me, a top-quality read from the get-go. Translations are often serviceable, telling the story as it was told in the original and not grasping, or conveying at any rate, whatever special sparkle the original had. It sounds weird to tell you that the cold, grim, gray landscape of Stalinist-Purge era Leningrad, peopled with terrorized victims and subjected to psychic violence, physical violence, and sensory deprivation on an industrial scale, has a sparkle to it. But it does.
Not a joyous resolution to the weird, theatrically staged and colorfully over-the-top crimes committed here...but a resolution I believed and I supported with my whole readerly heart. More of Zaitsev, please, Pushkin Vertigo. We need this kind of "history as sly social commentary" Russian fiction; we in the Anglophone West need the warning klaxon of what *real* oppression feels like, why it does to its victims, so we will stop our loud, pointless whinging.… (altro)
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: The debut of the ultimate noir detective series: set in Stalinist Russia, riddled with corruption, informers, and purges that takes paranoia to the next level
MURDER
1930s Leningrad. Stalin is tightening his grip on the Soviet Union, and a mood of fear cloaks the city. Detective Vasily Zaitsev is tasked with investigating a series of bizarre and seemingly motiveless homicides.
MAYHEM
As the curious deaths continue, precious Old Master paintings start to disappear from the Hermitage collection. Could the crimes be connected?
MISTRUST
When Zaitsev sets about his investigations, he meets with obstruction at every turn. Soon even he comes under suspicion from the Soviet secret police.
The resolute detective must battle an increasingly dangerous political situation in his dogged quest to find the murderer―and stay alive.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: This is a newly translated series-starting thriller. I'm eager for the second one to appear, so go buy this one now.
Seriously. The only way the publisher knows there's a market is if there are sales, so go on now.
What do you mean, "but why should I?" Oh very well. Look at this image, of the same title as the book:
Doesn't that simply say it all in artistic form? And the painting's in the Hermitage collection in Russia, too.
The 1930s were a scary, scary time to be a Soviet citizen. The surveillance state's apparatus was risibly primitive by comparison to today's hypercapitalist surveillance model, but it was effective. Like those old Hitchcock movies where men in slouch-brimmed hats smoked on street corners by your apartment, the pervasive atmosphere was paranoid and terrified. (Our {great-}grandparents had more sense than we complacent and indifferent acquiescers do.) To be a policeman in a state-sponsored terrorist society, to be studied minutely as one tries to achieve the ever-elusive goal of bringing justice to transgressors while avoiding the political pitfalls of society's mad/badness, adds a layer of suspense to thrillers.
Author Yakovleva does a truly creditable and credible job with Zaitsev, her sleuth. He doesn't miraculously float above The System somehow, nor does he set out to provoke The System's minions to make his points. He falls victim to the excesses of the times (CW for torture!) and he still stubbornly insists on doing the right thing by the victims of personal violence. It is very much in the vein of the "lone truth-seeker" genre of thriller. I think those stories can go wrong quickly, turning into libertarian screeds against any and all forms of government by equating them with oppression. This book dodges that bullet by being about, explicitly taking as its subject, that nightmarish oppressive government and its warped and broken victim/citizens. I wish more libertarians would read this kind of historical take because it puts into a cold, unfriendly light the mild checks on their worst selves that so chafe them.
Author Yakovleva is ably assisted in telling her story by Translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. There are bursts of informative explanatory things in the text that I'm sure are her work...no one in modern Russia likely needs as much explanation of the role of the OGPU, for example (the domestic secret police, like the FBI or latter-Soviet-days KGB). That this information, among so much other information needed by Anglophone readers not Russophone ones, was woven into the text pretty darn seamlessly is a testament to Translator Kemp's grasp of and skill at presenting the reader the best version of the original text.
What makes it a perfect book to get your thriller reader giftee, or your thriller loving self, is that very thing: It's the best version of what was, if my Spidey-senses do not deceive me, a top-quality read from the get-go. Translations are often serviceable, telling the story as it was told in the original and not grasping, or conveying at any rate, whatever special sparkle the original had. It sounds weird to tell you that the cold, grim, gray landscape of Stalinist-Purge era Leningrad, peopled with terrorized victims and subjected to psychic violence, physical violence, and sensory deprivation on an industrial scale, has a sparkle to it. But it does.
Not a joyous resolution to the weird, theatrically staged and colorfully over-the-top crimes committed here...but a resolution I believed and I supported with my whole readerly heart. More of Zaitsev, please, Pushkin Vertigo. We need this kind of "history as sly social commentary" Russian fiction; we in the Anglophone West need the warning klaxon of what *real* oppression feels like, why it does to its victims, so we will stop our loud, pointless whinging.… (altro)
1 
richardderus | 2 altre recensioni | Nov 25, 2022 |
richardderus | 2 altre recensioni | Nov 25, 2022 | Liste
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 83
- Popolarità
- #218,811
- Voto
- 3.4
- Recensioni
- 5
- ISBN
- 15
- Lingue
- 1
Death of the Red Rider didn't rise to those heights for a reason I'll get into, but it still provided an engaging read, populated by a mix of characters including the no-longer-convenient mistress of a high-ranking official; members of the USSR's soon-to-be-obsolete cavalry, some revolutionaries, some former fighters on behalf of the Czar; minor officials meant to guarantee participation in the collectivization of agriculture; and those resisting collectivization at a very high price.
To be honest, Death of the Red Rider struck me as not-quite-equal to Punishment of a Hunter because the mystery is centered within a cavalry school. A favorite horse has suddenly collapsed and died—and, by the way, a cavalry student was killed during the horse's collapse, but his death is being treated like a minor detail in comparison with the loss of the horse. I was never one of those girls who was horse mad, and I didn't go through a Black Beauty/Misty of Chincoteague phase. As a result, I found the novel's setting less than completely engaging. Zeitsev is still quietly brilliant, noting clues that everyone else is missing, and insisting on the true truth, rather than the truth the party would find convenient. But scenes of future cavalry officers riding in circles under the eye of a critical instructor left me cold. (I feel the same way about novels that take place on ships, but... we don't need to go there.)
On the other hand, if you were one of those horsey girls (or boys or nonbinary youths) you'll find an extra layer of enjoyment in Death of the Red Rider. And if you enjoy international and/or historical mysteries, you'll find Zeitsev an excellent companion regardless of your feelings about horses.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title; the opinions are my own.… (altro)