The Confession by Olen Steinhauer

Remember that Steinhauer's The Tourist put him on my power rotation after a single book. That was actually his 6th book. He has a series of 5 post WWII mysteries, one per decade beginning in the 1940s (The Bridge of Sighs). This is my third from that series, but it's actually the 2nd and takes place in the 1950s in Steinhauer's unnamed eastern European country and its capital.

Militia detective Ferenc Koleyeszar's marriage is falling apart. A long vacation at the family dacha only seemed to make things worse so a return home is not a happy prospect. He is sure his wife has been cheating with one of his co-workers. He is also a one-time author who can't seem to find his muse despite the encouragement of his writer-poet-artist-anarchist contemporaries who sit around smoking and drinking complaining that "plot is a capitalist construct to give lives a false sense of totality." Sounds like my college days in the bars. While the group rattles on, Ferenc plays with the rings on each of his fingers and fantasizing about the wife of a group member. What the rings represent is one of those "are you shitting me?" moments.

Work should be a welcome break from his crumbling life. How is this for a break: a party dignitary's wife disappears. An artist of some notoriety is found with his arms and legs broken, bound and hog-tied, and burned to a crisp in an abandoned warehouse in the canal district. The artist's wife turns up dead. A French mentor to the writer's group becomes stranger by the day. Records from a cold case about the death of a militia co-worker indicate a possible connection to some of the current murders. Moscow has sent someone (that's code for KGB) to help the militia office and befriends Brano Sev, a cop no one trusts (but is the major character in Liberation Movements, book #3). A friend in the group, Georgi, gets the call from internal security for a 'document check' (that's code for a nasty train ride to an even nastier work camp). An eccentric painter, jailed for 10 years, is getting released and a student demonstration, which Ferenc would prefer to join, goes bad and puts him in the crosshairs of the KGB officer on loan. Ferenc thinks, "if this isn't the most wonderful of times, then please don't let me know."

At least his wife isn't cheating with that co-worker. That was a one-time thing years ago. She tells him that she is actually carrying on with his partner - the first of a number of confessions.

The missing wife ran away from an abusive husband who kept her locked up and drugged. When Ferenc learns the details and finds the wife, he exercises his own brand of justice by giving her money for a train ticket to Moscow and her family, then plays dumb with the husband. At least Georgi is not sent to a camp and is so happy he "could stall a Volga."

All the murders have a connection that is all about artistic envy, jealousy, infidelity, fame, and revenge, the sweetest of all motives. Stenhauer paints a grim picture of 1950s behind the developing Iron Curtain where checking into to the Metropol hotel will "end up on its daily report to internal security". But it's not all atmosphere. Ferenc is on one hand a deeply flawed detective and husband, making judgmental decisions about actions in the interrelated cases all the while passing judgement on his wife as he has a masochistic affair with another's wife and nails a hotel clerk on an overnight trip to a work camp, the "memory and knowledge of which kills his serenity."

A momentary lapse while policing that student demonstration has put a chip in the pocket of the KBG, but that officer tells Ferenc that all transgressions will be forgiven with a confession, a confession that Ferenc knows will put him in a work camp. But at least his wife will not be drawn in and will be well cared for by his partner, her lover.

Sounds like a downer and maybe it is, but I find Steinhauer's graceful, fluid writing style to be the real subject and hopefully, the chosen quotes might give a short preview of what awaits. He may have been nominated for numerous awards and been on a number of 'best of the year' lists, but he doesn't seem to have the following of other contemporaries.

Two more to go - 36 Yalta Blvd and Victory Square.

East Coast Don