Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

From the Publisher:
For his acclaimed mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov of the Moscow Police, Stuart M. Kaminsky won the Edgar Allan Poe Award and such accolades as "among the best mysteries being written" (San Diego Union) and "his people throb with life" (Philadelphia Inquirer). Now Rostnikov returns to action in this evocative and brilliantly original tour de force...

MURDER ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS

In the old Russia, the law was written by Stalin.
Now it's written by Kafka.

Only in the capital city of this new, chaotic world can a skinhead Jew rule the musical subculture. He's the just-kidnapped heavy-metal star son of one of Moscow's most powerful citizens. The search for him through the exotic network of local illicit postpunk clubs is conducted by two glaring fish out of water: Detectives Karpo, champion of old-school Soviet justice, and Zelach, an unlikely paragon of instinct over intellect. In another kind of underground, a murderous young woman stays one ghostly step ahead of the authorities. Her killing ground is the Moscow Metro. Her weapon is a dangerously honed kitchen knife. And her serial victims, all male, all well-dressed, all members of the city's new elite, are seemingly selected at random.

Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov rides into the frigid east on the legendary Trans-Siberian Express. Six thousand miles long and built at a cost of more than a trillion czarist rubles and thousands of lives, the line from Moscow to Vladivostok carries the one-legged inspector in his pursuit of a treasured historical document, as well as a greater find with even more explosive consequences. For behind the quest and many miles away back in Moscow looms the figure of Rostnikov's superior, Director of the Office of Special Investigation Igor Yaklovev, whose long-nurtured designs for power await their moment of fruition - while the entire Russian government faces a hard and unsuspected fall.

Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express. Mysterious Press , ISBN: 0892967471 (October, 2001), 288 p., $24.95