Cover image of "The Silver Bone," the first in a new series of Ukraine mysteries

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Kyiv, Ukraine, 1919. Everything is scarce in this city of half a million souls. Food. Water. Electricity. And chaos reigns. Control of the city and its suburbs shifts from week to week among warring factions. The Red Army. The Whites under Denikin. And armed peasants aroused by local warlords. Meanwhile, bands of cossacks rampage through the streets, wielding sabers on everyone they encounter. And it is one such saber that cuts down Samson Kolechko’s father and lops off Samson’s right ear. Now an orphan, Samson must navigate Kyiv’s dark and dangerous streets to get treatment for his ear, buy enough food to survive, and protect his family’s large and comfortable flat from squatters. This is life turned upside-down in the Russian Revolution, rendered with great skill by Andrey Kurkov in The Silver Bone, one of Ukraine’s most illustrious writers. It’s the first in a new series of Ukraine mysteries.

A city awash in crime

Kyiv is awash in crime. Simply walking down a street at night is a risk to life and limb. But for Samson Kolechko, the greatest threat is that he lives alone in a huge flat and may find at any moment that he’s evicted in favor of a large homeless family or a squad of Red Army soldiers who “requisition” the place. Then a pair of soldiers burst in the door, dump several heavy boxes on the floor, and announce that they’re staying. At least they let Samson keep his room.

Soon it becomes clear that those soldiers, and the contents of their boxes, are the opening act in a mystery. Because inside one of the boxes is a stash of silverware, candlesticks, and other solid silver objects the soldiers obviously stole. But when Samson goes to report the soldiers’ crime, the officer in charge presses him into service in the police—and charges him with solving the mystery of where all that silver came from. Yet the mystery runs far deeper, as Samson discovers when he takes his first halting steps as a police investigator.

The Silver Bone (Kyiv Mystery #1) by Andrey Kurkov (2024) 368 pages ★★★★☆

Photo of Red Army soldiers marching through the streets of Kyiv in 1919, the setting for this first in a new series of Ukraine mysteries
Soldiers of the Red Army march through Kyiv in 1919. This is a familiar sight in Andrey Kurkov’s novel. Image: Encyclopedia of Ukraine

Untrained, the new detective takes on a dangerous case

Samson’s training as a detective consists solely of a brief course in marksmanship and a stack of files left by the tsarist police. He hasn’t a clue about what to do from one minute to the next. But another, less recent hire at the station generously offers to help. He’s a former Orthodox priest who’s renounced religion and joined the Reds. With his help from time to time, Samson gradually grows into his new role. And he soon learns that one object in that box of silver may be central to his case. It’s a full-size, solid silver replica of a human femur. And that silver bone will lead him on a path through the city that will repeatedly threaten his life.

In telling this story, Kurkov renders a portrait of a city in the throes of revolution. We visit the homes and shops of tradesmen such as cobblers and tailors. We observe the chaotic flows of power from one faction to another, all the while the city’s people suffer, huddling in their homes. And we learn about the census underway despite the turmoil. It’s a convincing portrayal from an author who as I write is himself caught up in the chaos of war, living as an internally displaced person in his native Ukraine.

The Silver Bone is a highly promising launch to Kurkov’s Kyiv Mystery series. We’ll meet Samson Kolechko again. The second novel will appear soon.

About the author

Photo of Andrey Kurkov, author of this new series of Ukraine mysteries
Andrey Kurkov. Image: Eamonn McCabe – Guardian

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian author and public intellectual who writes in Russian. He is the author of 19 novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin, nine books for children, and about twenty documentary, fiction, and TV movie scripts.

Kurkov was born in Leningrad in 1961, his father a test pilot, his mother a doctor. When he was two years old the family moved to Kyiv. After graduating from the Kyiv Foreign Languages Institute, he went to work for the military police and served as a prison guard in Odessa. His first novel appeared in print two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union. For years, he tried in vain to find a publisher, receiving more than 500 rejections. He published on his own, sometimes selling copies of his books directly from street stalls. However, as Wikipedia notes, “later in his career he won acclaim as one of the most successful Ukrainian authors in the post-Soviet era and has featured on European bestseller lists.”

Kurkov lives in Kyiv with his English wife, Elizabeth, and their three children. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he became an internally displaced person and continued to write and broadcast about the war.

Although Ukraine is an independent nation, in 1919 it had been part of the Russian Empire for many years and would remain inside the USSR until 1991. So, you might also be interested in The best Russian mysteries and thrillers and Police procedurals spanning modern Russian history.

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