Yalta Boulevard Sequence

As a member of the Ministry for State Security, it is part of Brano Sev's job to do what the authorities ask, no matter what. So when he gets an order to travel to the village of his birth in order to interrogate a potential defector, he goes. When a man turns up dead shortly after he arrives and Brano is framed for the murder, he assumes this is part of the plan and allows it to run its course. But Comrade Brano Sev learns that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all.

Upon reaching the tumultuous 1980s, Olen Steinhauer's literary crime series set in Eastern Europe comes full circle as one of the People's Militia's earliest cases reemerges to torment its inspectors, including militia chief Emil Brod, the original detective on the case. His arrest of a revolutionary leader in the late 1940s resulted in the politician's imprisonment, but at the time Brod was too young to understand how great the cost would be. Only now, in 1989, when he is days from retirement and spends more and more time looking over his shoulder, does he realize that his actions in the line of duty may get him—and others—killed. Steinhauer masterfully brings together a story of revenge at any cost with the portrait of a country on the brink of collapse.

In 1975, a People's Militia homicide investigator is on a plane for Istanbul when it is hijacked and then explodes in midair. The two investigators assigned to the case believe that their superiors are keeping them in the dark but don't know why, until they learn that everything is connected to a seven-year-old murder.

In 1956 during the Hungarian revolution, with the entire Eastern Bloc on edge, Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar must track down a murderer. Drawn deep into an underworld of betrayal and violence, he finds that he is not so different from those he pursues.

In the volatile and shifting political atmosphere of Eastern Europe after World War II, an inexperienced homicide detective fresh out of the academy is assigned a homicide that no one wants to solve.