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.
In September, the AKS GKNB detained the head of the Kulundu frontier post in the course of operational-search measures when giving a bribe to an employee of the state committee…
A David Mitchell novel is always a delight, if not always an unalloyed one. For me, ‘Ghostwritten’ is still his best work, even if ‘The Bone Clocks’ is perhaps his…
I may not care much for this type of mystery or thriller novel, but the covers for this British Library Crime Classics series are a testament to the ability of…
On September 11, a citizen applied to the State Committee for National Security with a request to take action against the judge of the Kara-Suu region "A.Zh.S.", who extorted money…
Abror Sabirov, son of Shukhrat Sabirov, the director of the State Agency for Antimonopoly Regulations of Kyrgyzstan, was placed in jail-1 in Bishkek for two months.
The future of Kyrgyzstan depends, in part, on the rise of ecotourism; of people wanting to travel to discover the natural beauty and wildlife of this small, mountainous and remote…
Kyrgyzstan is about to have elections in a couple of weeks time. The Central Election Commission checked 1,912 registered parliamentary candidates for criminal records.
The SCM GUVD of Bishkek received information that citizen E.E., born in 2000, carried the skin of a rare wild animal, and was making attempts to illegally sell it.
There are some extra categories not covered here: Forgot I already had a copy Given to me, but I forget by whom Bought as a present but decided to keep…
Although the 18 titles in the Burke series by Andrew Vachss tail off in impact towards the later novels, the intensity of earlier books such as ‘Flood’, ‘Blue Belle’ and…
I’ll be honest: I haven’t read ‘Gallows Court’ by Martin Edwards. And books set in pre-war London, the Golden Age of crime fiction, tend not to feature high on my…
The main character (and the most terrifying) in Jack O’Connell’s books is not a person, it’s a place. Quinsigamond, a post-industrial New England city, where derelict warehouses, porn theatres and…
‘My babulya’s been murdered.’ Not words you ever want to hear, especially when you’ve put your jacket on, decided to walk home though the park, anything to avoid wearing your…
Amateurs - An Akyl Borubaev story The squad room was empty, the only sound the whisper of dust gently settling on filing cabinets stuffed with unsolved cases.