A Vengeful Longing: A Novel (St. Petersburg Mysteries)

The acclaimed author of The Gentle Axe returns with another atmospheric thriller starring investigator Porfiry Petrovich Hailed with glowing reviews, R. N. Morris's The Gentle Axe borrowed Porfiry Petrovich of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment to create a wholly new, hauntingly authentic novel of suspense. A Vengeful Longing, Petrovich's next outing, is even more engrossing. As the laconic investigator follows a trail that begins innocently with a box of chocolates, he is drawn deep into St. Petersburg's squalid heart. Aided by Morris's effortless prose, readers are immersed in the stifling world of nineteenth-century tsarist Russia and treated to an unforgettable rendering of a brutal time and place that will ensnare every fan of sophisticated historical fiction. It’s the middle of a hot, dusty St. Petersburg summer in the late 1860s. A doctor brings home a fancy box of chocolates for his wife and son—a strange gift on a scorching Saturday afternoon. Within an hour, both mother and child die an excruciating death, and the doctor is immediately arrested, suspected of poisoning. As investigator Porfiry Petrovich concedes, in such cases the obvious solution often turns out to be the correct solution. And in the city’s sweltering, oppressive atmosphere, even he lacks the energy to delve any deeper. But when additional, apparently unconnected, murders occur on the other side of town, a subtle and surprising pattern starts to emerge. Porfiry is forced to reassess his assumptions and follow a tenuous, uncertain trail that takes him into the hidden, squalid heart of the city and brings him face to face with incomprehensible horror and cruelty. Set in St. Petersburg in 1868, Morris's second novel to feature Porfiry Petrovich puts the detective on the trail of a series of vile murders. When the wife and son of a doctor die after consuming a box of chocolates at their dacha, the obvious suspect is the morphine-addicted doctor. Then a shooting and a stabbing lead Petrovich elsewhere-to an elegant confectioner's full of pastries and possible revolutionaries as well as to the city's underworld Nineteenth-century Russian investigator Porfiry Petrovich doubts an initial conclusion that a St. Petersburg doctor is responsible for his wife's and son's poisoning deaths when the case is tied to another murder across town