New thrillers from the Eastern front (From York Press)

New thrillers from the Eastern front

11:37am Saturday 21st January 2012 in Books

JULIAN COLE rounds up the latest crime novels with a selection from Eastern Europe

HERE are two crime novels from Romania, and one from Russia. All in their way are good reads, with the first pair offering an insight into a country that remains mysterious to many of us.

Attack In The Library by George Arion (Profusion Books, £7.99) is a classic of popular Romanian fiction, and was written in the 1980s during the days of dictatorship. It begins with a lovely set-up – “The corpse is to the right of me, lying on a pile of books. At any other time I would have hurried to rearrange the books on their shelves…”

From this point, the enjoyably flawed first-person hero, journalist Mladin, is caught in a mad whirl of love and death. As the first body in the library is moved and unaccountably returned, another appears too, and the seemly lowly Mladin falls in love with a high-born musician, the beautiful Mihaela, whose family disapprove. Love will not run smoothly.

Mladin attempts to find out who he is being framed by, and is dragged backwards through a personal maze, while delivering amusing observations on his country and on life in general.

The denouement gathers all the suspects together in a witty subversion of the Agatha Christie reveal. Along the way, a great deal of fun and amusement is to be had in this sometimes surreal account of totalitarianism.

Kill The General by Bogdan Hrib (Profusion Books, £7.99) is a thriller in the more traditional mould. It is set across two periods and concerns an unlikely hero of detective fiction, book editor and part-time hit-man Stelian Munteanu.

In the early section, Stelian is doing his national service, when among the frozen deprivations, he meets the titular general, and is to an extent befriended by him.

Years later, he is approached with two offers concerning General Simionescu: one to publish his book of memoirs and the second to assassinate him. That twist was fairly easy to spot, others satisfy in their ability to surprise.

Profusion Books is a new publisher specialising in Eastern European crime. The two books sampled here are both rewardingly different, although let down by a rash of footnotes which interrupt the flow of the fiction. An appendix explaining the local references and so on would have been less distracting.

He Lover Of Death by Boris Akunin (Phoenix Fiction, £7.99) is an Erast Fandorin mystery by a writer who is a bestseller in his homeland. Mind you, the fanciful Fandorin hardly makes an appearance until more than halfway through this tale of Death, an alluring and dangerous young woman whose paramours come to various sticky ends.

Orphan and urchin Senka Skorikov escapes from his wicked uncle, tangles with a criminal gang led by the evil Prince, branches out on his own; all of which is dangerous, although not as risky as the passion he develops for the deadly heroine.

Treasure buried deep in underground tunnels of Moscow sends Senka on his way, and in great danger, in an historical crime novel that races along and is quite unlike anything else you will have read.

Book jacket comparisons with Tolstoy and Conan Doyle may be going it a bit, but there is much to enjoy here, and this reviewer would certainly seek out further Akunin novels.