asked the boss why we were dancing around like this, when I could have taken Borubaev out of the world with a single well-placed shot. I could tell he wasn’t…
My immediate instinct was to call the number, but decided to hold off, at least for a couple of hours. Being a foreign number, I wouldn’t be able to use…
I put the call in, explained that Borubaev was in the city morgue, unfortunately only visiting rather than checking in. Presumably he’d gone to see Husam Umarov’s mortal remains. I…
A large part of my job is waiting. Waiting for the next crime to occur, for witnesses to come forward and speak, waiting in damp doorways or in run-down bars…
I knew I couldn’t call on my colleagues back at Sverdlovsky to help me out. None of them would want to be within a hundred kilometres of a missing Uzbek…
I was parked across the road from the lawyer’s office when Borubaev emerged, holding the handrail as he made his way down the steps. Even from a distance, it was…
My idea of somewhere private to call Guliya Sabirova was a little unusual, but it always pays to keep everyone guessing. I was pretty sure that Guliya Sabirova wasn’t calling…
‘Inspector Borubaev?’ A woman’s voice, elderly, dry, rasping and hoarse, as if she’d damaged her vocal cords after decades of shouting. I got the sense of fifty untipped cigarettes a…
I’ve never understood why they call it hogtied when you fasten hands and feet together. In my village, when we slaughter a pig, we just leave a trail of apples…
I looked around the empty car park, hoping to see Saltanat walking towards me, hands held up in apology. Bit I knew she wouldn’t have decided on a whim to…
It’s always a pain in the arse if you end up having to take prisoners and keep them in reasonable shape, unharmed apart from a few cuts and bruises, that…
By rights, I should have made my way to Sverdlovsky Station, brushed the dust and cobwebs off my desk, filed a report and sent it to everyone I could think…
Inspector Banks meets Inspector Borubaev I was already a big fan of Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks books before I met him at the Emirates Literature Festival in 2015. My debut…
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the…
‘No answer.’ ‘Try again,’ I said. Saltanat hit redial, glared at the phone as if she were holding a scorpion. ‘Nothing.’ I reached into the wardrobe, pulled out my canvas…
The first three or four Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell were ground-breaking: CSI forensics together with an interesting character with lots of quirks and problems in her life, both…
‘What do you think?’ We were walking down from Kiev Street towards Chui Prospekt and down through the trees of Panfilov Park on our way back to the hotel. Questioning…
'Natalya Ivanova does for St Petersburg what Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko did for Soviet-era Moscow. . . taut, fast-moving and compellingly believable’
The penthouse had floor to ceiling windows, all the better to enjoy the spectacular view up towards the mountains on the south side of the city. The main room was…
The death of Mo Hayder last year from motor neurone disease at just 59 was a major loss to crime and thriller fiction, not just in Britain but internationally.
‘What the fuck you mean, you missed them? And then lost them?’ I did my best to look sorrowful, repentant. ‘It wasn’t an easy shot. Snowing, and no knowing which…
George Pelecanos may be best known for his television work on ‘The Wire’, ‘Treme’ and ‘We Own This City’ but his Nick Stefanos novels repay investigating.
We must have been followed from the hotel,’ I said. ‘The question is, how did they know we were there?’ ‘I don’t think there would be a police alert for…
The boss wasn’t happy, not that he’s ever been a gleam of spring sunlight shining over the Tien Shan mountains. He only grunted when I handed over the thirty grand,…
For forty years, the East German State Security Service, better known as STASI, watched over its citizens with a brutal, repressive and highly effective regime that turned citizens into informants…
steel door frame. We both dived towards the trash skip, unholstered our guns, looked around. The attack could have come from anywhere, a parked car, a window in one of…
Eight hours later, our car was doing its best to get through the ruts and puddles of the road that led into the apartment blocks of Alamedin. To describe Alamedin…
We knew we couldn’t return to the safe house. Too many police and four dead bodies to explain away. My new passport was in the glove compartment, and Saltanat, always…
We buried Orbek near the top of a mountain ridge overlooking the Charvak Reservoir, an hour’s drive outside Tashkent. It’s a popular weekend destination during the summer, but in the…
‘Unhook the delicate, crazy lace of flesh, detach the heart with a single cut, unmask the tissue behind the skin, unhinge the ribs, disclose the spine, take down the long…
Four of them, a team. One of them would have been the driver. Confident of taking us, otherwise he’d have stayed in the car, engine running, for a quick escape.…
The window at the far side of the room shattered, and slivers of glass cascaded like ice across the floor. Arctic air slammed into the room, as the curtains billowed…
I never knew when Chinara would decide to come and visit me. Perhaps that’s one of the few privileges the dead still enjoy. I felt a hand shake my shoulder,…
“The explosion sucked all the air out of the room in its wake. Dimitri slammed back into the wall, gut-shot. I …took a deep breath and walked around to where…
Counting and splitting the take is where it usually goes wrong. Forget about bodyguards, armed police. Everything we do comes in a package marked danger; it’s all part of the…
Meet a Cleveland plain-dealing P.I. Milan Jacovitch is a Slovenian-American ex-cop, ex-vet, ex-married, and that means he has a history like a lot of private detectives.
‘Husam was my father’s half-brother, by my grandfather’s first wife. Twenty years older than me, already married to a Kyrgyz woman and living in Bishkek when I was a child.’
Daniel Woodrell’s ‘The Death Of Sweet Mister’ could be described as falling into the same school of Southern Gothic as Flannery O’Conner and Carson McCullers, but I prefer Woodrell’s own…
‘How did I end up in Tashkent?’ I asked, genuinely bewildered. Now I understood why neither the nurse nor the doctor had said a word to me. I wasn’t supposed…
Resurrection? Easy to say, harder to achieve. Even the acknowledged expert in the field took three days, and I was no expert. Then again, he wasn’t shot three times on…
An ordinary day, nothing to remember. A few problems with suppliers not delivering on time in spite of promises. A couple of payments still outstanding, even after three or four…
For almost 25 years, Nodirbek Ganiev, an Uzbek citizen, was hiding in the Chui region with a fake passport. At home, he is suspected of murder with particular cruelty and…
The good thing about living in a country with two Christmases and three New Years (if you count the Chinese) is that the decorations stay up for longer...
In the village of Romanovka, a 27-year-old resident of the Chui region was threatened with a knife, and more than 50,000 soms ($600) and a mobile phone were taken from…
A Bishkek animal rights activist wrote, “Last night I saw a dog near the intersection of Yunusaliev and Dzhantoshev streets. She ran out of one of the many Korean restaurants…
In the mountains of Issyk-Kul, a memorial installation was erected in memory of the victims of the 1916 uprising. The installation on Mount Zharylgan-Too, on the northern shore of Lake…
Officers of the State Committee for National Security, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, detained two citizens of Kyrgyzstan engaged in robberies to finance the terrorist underground.
In Bishkek, suspects in beating up a resident of the capital were detained. At 02.00, the police received a message that unknown persons were beating a man on Manas Avenue.
The White House was seized on the night of October 5-6 as a result of thousands of protests disagreeing with the results of the October 4 parliamentary elections. There were…
Nurmat Bolponov, deputy head of the Drug Trafficking Service, shot at his subordinate Yesterday the head of one of the departments came to the office of the deputy head of…
Elections were held on Sunday, and today, a crowd of around 6,000 people assembled in the main square for a peaceful protest about bribery and corruption leading to rigged ballots.
Three new covers for Orwell’s seminal ‘1984’. Not surprising, I suppose that all three feature the motif of an eye, taking as their inspiration from the slogan that dominates the…
Erkin Bakirov, deputy director of the bankruptcy department under the Ministry of Economy, was detained, after being caught offering a bribe of 100,000 soms ($1,250) to an official.