Охота

Детективка #2

by Максим Сонин

В Санкт-Петербурге произошло таинственное убийство — неизвестный с топором появился словно из ниоткуда и убил журналиста. Мишка вместе с соседкой Верой едет в Питер, где, сотрудничая с полицией, пытается выйти на след убийцы. Кто он такой? Как ему удается незаметно передвигаться по городу? И при чем тут наркотик «Двоица», с которым детективка столкнулась в Москве? Мишке вновь предстоит раскрыть изощренное преступление, однако в этот раз опасность угрожает не только ее жизни.

«Охота» — вторая часть детективной трилогии Максима Сонина о шестнадцатилетней детективке Мишке Мироновой.

208 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2021

Reviews

[RLReviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Hunt" is the second Maxim Sonin's novel that features Miriam "Mishka" Mironova, the 16 years old detective. This time there is no question on whether or not a murder was committed - the starting point of "The Double" - a prominent journalist was killed by an axe in the middle of a snowy St. Petersburg street. The killer leaves a mark, which immediately connects him to the distributors of the same mysterious drug, Dvoitsa (The Double), whom Mishka pursued in the first novel. Yet this time Mishka's opponents are not university students, canny and urban, but a well-trained killing machine with a Dostoevskian attitude towards his untermensch victims.

Dostoevsky who invented both the modern crime novel and the dark soul of the St. Petersburg, the northern capital of Russia, is in the air throughout the novel. Yet the pace is certainly unDostoevskian - whatever the doubts that police officers and Mishka who helps them might have, they have to act fast - the fast is how the killer goes. And unlike the police, Mishka has one more person to save - a 6-year old orphant Eva who lives in a deep-forest skit with a ruthless sect that produces the Dvoitsa drug. The problem is that Mishka has never met Eva and has no idea where the skit is located...

Sonin's Dostoevsky connection is no accident. As Dostoevsky himself challenged the world of the Russian novel, then-dominated by Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, Sonin tries to re-invent the Russian crime novel in times of total domination of Boris Akunin. Akunin not only made Russian history fascinating again, his books dominate every crime novel ranking in Russian. Sometimes 10 of the top 20 are Akunin's, sometimes 15. The rest is filled by crowd-pleasing crime stories by Dontsova, Ustinova, Marinina, always openly ironic if not outright comical, trying to lure the reader into a literature game rather a world of serious crimes. In contrast, Sonin is serious - the young detective and her police friends fight real evil, and even if a crime is far-fetched, the reader feels the chilling presence of a killer in a dark and wintry St. Petersburg.