The Case of the General's Thumb

(Paperback)

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Description

When the corpse of a distinguished general and presidential adviser is found, attached to an advertising balloon, lieutenant Viktor Slutsky is sent in to investigate. Meanwhile, KGB officer Nik Tsensky arrives in Kiev for a secret mission. Their quests eventually converge as they race around Europe becoming involved in a battle between the Russian and Ukrainian secret services as they hunt for hidden treasure - a stash of KGB gold. A larger-than-life hitman, bombs under furniture, a hearse, a deaf-and-dumb blonde and a backfiring automatic all play a part as Kurkov evokes a world of secret militia not seen before in Western fiction.

Reviews

An ebullient black comedy... Reminiscent of the best Soviet dissident literature * Daily Telegraph *
Full of touches of grim insight and tactful surrealism, with just enough of the absurd to suggest a cross between John le Carre's Smiley and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita -- John Burnside * Scotland on Sunday *
Kurkov is a fine satirist and a real, blackly comic find * Observer *
Kurkov flips from mock-tragedy to comedy and back again, planting the ominous and the absurd neatly among deadpan descriptions of a daily life in denial * The Times *
Kurkov received universal praise for his debut novel Death and the Penguin... Kurkov's latest is better * Time Out *

Author Bio

Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the cult bestseller Death and the Penguin.