Work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway on March 9, 1891. Then, Tsar Alexander III still ruled the Russian Empire. But when he died at the age of 49 three years later, his feckless son Nicholas II ascended to the Imperial Throne. And at immense expense, Nicholas realized his father’s dream of connecting European Russia with the Pacific in 1904. The result was the longest railroad in the world at 5,700 miles. Around 300,000 people, mostly prisoners, died in the effort. The construction is underway in 1894 as Stuart Kaminsky opens the 14th of his 16 novels featuring Chief Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. More than a century later, Rostnikov leads a crack team of investigators in Moscow’s Office of Special Investigations. And the case his boss assigns him in 2000 is directly linked to events on the railway in 1894.
Three “unsolvable” cases for Rostnikov’s team
Kaminsky’s novel, Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express, follows the formula of its predecessors. Rostnikov and the members of his team work independently, pursuing three investigations simultaneously. Paired off, they tackle cases no other police agency will touch. These cases “are politically sensitive, unlikely to be solved, or offer little promise and much potential grief.” Yet, somehow, Rostnikov and his colleagues will solve them all. They always do. And as the action unfolds, we gain perspective on police operations in Russia in 2000, the year when Vladimir Putin moved into the Kremlin as President of Russia.
Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #14 of 16) by Stuart M. Kaminsky (2001) 288 pages ★★★★☆
A police procedural that plumbs the depths of crime in post-Soviet Russia
For Inspectors Emil Karpo and Zelach, the challenge is to find a young skinhead musician who has gone missing. Why? Someone has abducted him, and he’s the son of a politically powerful businessman. The case will immerse them in skinhead culture, then pervasive in Moscow. And it’s complicated: the antisemitic musician is secretly Jewish himself.
Meanwhile, Inspectors Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeva,pursue a mysterious woman who is murdering riders on the Moscow Underground. The victims are all well-dressed, middle-aged men. She wields a sharpened kitchen knife to lethal effect.
And Inspector Rostnikov himself takes on the most dangerous assignment of them all. With tickets on the Trans-Siberian Express, he and his son Iosef Rostnikov are to identify and arrest some unknown person who is carrying an enormous sum of money to pay for a politically sensitive historical artifact somewhere on the railway. The Chief Inspector’s boss, Igor Yakovlev (“the Yak”) will share no details. No doubt the seemingly impossible assignment will add to the Yak’s power if Rostnikov is successful. But how?
Summary of the novel by Claude-AI
In recent months I’ve learned to my chagrin that the artificial intelligence from Anthropic, Claude-AI, version Sonnet 4, does a much better job than I can do summarizing any book I’m reviewing. So I asked the app to do so here. The result follows. As you can see, it includes important details I glossed over in my review above. It’s verbatim, although I’ve added subheads to break up the text and deleted the URLs Claude includes to its sources.
Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express is the fourteenth novel in Stuart M. Kaminsky’s acclaimed Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov series, published in 2001. The novel follows Chief Inspector Rostnikov, a one-legged former weightlifting champion, as he navigates multiple complex cases in post-Soviet Russia under Vladimir Putin’s leadership.
A century-old mystery
The main plot centers on a century-old mystery involving a secret treaty . the Russian Czar and Japan that was stolen during the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. When a large sum of money is sent from Odessa to Vladivostok to purchase this mysterious Czarist document, Rostnikov’s superior suspects it may be the long-lost treaty, prompting Rostnikov to board the legendary Trans-Siberian Express to intercept the transaction. During his 6,000-mile journey eastward, Rostnikov successfully foils a world-class hit man, captures an elusive courier, and neutralizes a seductive counter-agent.
A multi-plot structure
The novel employs a multi-plot structure characteristic of the series. While Rostnikov travels east, his team in Moscow handles two other cases: investigating a mysterious woman dubbed “the Phantom of the Underground” who has been randomly stabbing well-dressed men in the Moscow Metro, and locating a kidnapped heavy metal rock star known as the Naked Cossack, who happens to be the son of a powerful Jewish businessman. Rostnikov’s son Iosef, now part of the Special Investigations team, and detective Elena Timofeyeva lead the subway murder investigation, while inspectors Emil Karpo and Zelach pursue the kidnapping case through Moscow’s post-punk underground music scene.
Capturing the political intrigue and dysfunction of the post-Soviet era
The narrative weaves together these contemporary mysteries with historical vignettes about the brutal construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s, when thousands of convicts died building the line. Kaminsky richly depicts the complexities of modern Russia, capturing the political intrigue and dysfunction of the post-Soviet era while maintaining the series’ trademark quirky characters and procedural detail. The novel ultimately sees all three cases resolved successfully, with Rostnikov returning to Moscow with both the sought-after document and some political leverage to protect his dedicated team.
About the author
The late Stuart M. Kaminsky (1934-2009) wrote three long-running series of detective novels as well as other novels, numerous short stories, and nonfiction books in his professional field of film studies. The 16 books in the Porfiry Rostnikov series appeared in the years 1981 to 2009. They followed an even longer series of novels about a Hollywood detective named Toby Peters in the 1940s. Kaminsky taught film studies near where he grew up in Chicago at Northwestern University for 16 years, and then taught at Florida State for six years.
For related reading
I’m reviewing this whole series in chronological order. You’ll find a guide to the series, as well as my reviews of the preceding 12 books, at Police procedurals spanning modern Russian history. And you’ll see this book in good company at The best police procedurals.
And check out Good books about Vladimir Putin, modern Russia and the Russian oligarchy and The best Russian mysteries and thrillers.
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