36 Yalta Boulevard

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36 Yalta Boulevard

Title:

36 Yalta Boulevard

Alternate title:

Thirty-six Yalta Boulevard

Author:

Steinhauer, Olen, author.

Series:

Yalta Boulevard sequence ;

Series Number:

Summary:

State Security Officer Brano Sev's job is to do what his superiors ask, no matter what. Even if that means leaving his post to work the assembly line in a factory, fitting electrical wires into gauges. So when he gets a directive from his old bosses---the intimidating men above him at the Ministry of State Security, collectively known for the address of their headquarters on Yalta Boulevard, a windowless building consisting of blind offices and dark cells---he follows orders. This time he is to resume his job in State Security and travel to the village of his birth in order to interrogate a potential defector. But when a villager turns up dead shortly after he arrives, Brano is framed for the murder. Again trusting his superiors, he assumes this is part of their plan and allows it to run its course, a decision that leads him into exile in Vienna, where he finally begins to ask questions. The answers in 36 Yalta Boulevard, Olen Steinhauer's tour-de-force political thriller, teach Comrade Brano Sev that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all.

Edition:

1st ed.

Physical Description:

308 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Genre:

Detective and mystery fiction.

Subject Term:

Police -- Fiction.

Defectors -- Crimes against -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Vienna (Austria) -- Fiction.

Europe, Eastern -- Fiction.

Publisher:

St. Martin's Minotaur,

Publication Date:

2005

ISBN:

9780312332013

Publication Information:

New York : St. Martin's Minotaur, 2005.

Call Number:

STEINHA

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607001809352	Adult Fiction	STEINHA	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

Olen Steinhauer's acclaimed first two novels, "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Confession," have garnered thus far an Edgar nomination, an Anthony nomination, a Macavity nomination, a Historical Dagger nomination, and five starred reviews. Now he takes this superb literary series set in a nameless Eastern European country into the 1960s.
State Security Officer Brano Sev is the secretive member of the homicide department of the capital's people's militia. No one else quite trusts him, but it is part of his 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 when the plan leads him into exile in Vienna, he finally begins to ask questions.
In fact, in "The Man from Yalta Boulevard," a tour-de-force political thriller from Olen Steinhauer, Comrade Brano Sev learns that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all.

Author Notes

Olen Steinhauer was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 21, 1970. He received an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston. After college, he spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright Grant. This experience helped provide the inspiration for his first five books. His works include The Bridge of Sighs, The Cairo Affair, All the Old Knives, and the Milo Weaver Series. In 2010, he received the Hammett Prize for best literary crime novel for The Nearest Exit.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Did Brano Sev, an agent of an unnamed Eastern European country, kill Bertrand Richter in Vienna in the 1960s? Or was he set up by his superiors at the Ministry of State Security, the headquarters of his service located at the address that gives Edgar-finalist Steinhauer's uneven third novel its title? And why does he have a slip of paper with the name Dijana Frankovic on it when he wakes up, bewildered, in a Vienna park? Even Sev doesn't know-amnesia!-but the consequences are all too clear: he's demoted to a dead-end factory job, "fitting electrical wires into gauges so that the machines of socialist agriculture would never fail." (The author ably captures socialist rhetoric.) Sev gets a chance at redemption, and the opportunity to find out what really happened, when the ministry sends him home, to the provincial town of B?brka, to investigate a possible double agent, Jan Soroka. While the details of life behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War ring true, some readers may find the flawed Sev too undeveloped a character to care about his fate. The real story involves Sev's father, who left the country under suspicion of collaboration after WWII, but the plot's Byzantine complexity, more confusing than intriguing, clouds that classic father-son drama. Agent, Matt Williams at the Gernert Company. Author tour. (June 13) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal Review

At the height of the Cold War in 1966, things have gone badly for Brano Sev, a major in the Ministry of State Security in an Eastern Bloc country. Sent to Vienna to plug a leak, Sev is accused of sabotaging the mission and soon finds himself back home working in a factory, lucky to have avoided prison. Five months later, his former boss, Col. Laszlo Cerny, shows up with an offer: check out a defector who has returned to B?brka, an isolated village north of the capital, where Sev was born and still has family, and he may earn reinstatement. Thus begins a quest for the truth behind a series of baffling events on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Aware that he is being used but unable to figure out for what purpose, Sev finds that not only is his fate at stake but also that of his country. Steinhauer (The Confession) is a master at entangling a compelling protagonist in a spellbinding web where each broken thread entraps the character (and the reader) in yet another mystery. This is an imaginative, brilliantly plotted espionage thriller, with finely detailed settings and a protagonist of marvelous complexity. Highly recommended. [See Mystery Prepub, LJ 2/1/05.]-Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.