Sunset in Moscow
Moscow at the beginning of the 21st century. The empire is long gone, leaving behind a city of oligarchs whose bullet-proof BMWs drive past babushkas sifting through garbage. Glamorous hotels overlook dilapidated neighborhoods and billboards with girls in luscious bikinis hide the hammer and sickle. Against this ominous backdrop, bodies start appearing in the snow.
Arkady Yevgenovich Zacharin, a Jewish detective in the Moscow police is the first to discover what all these bodies have in common. But everyone here has a past, and Zacharin`s forces him to keep his discovery a secret. In this psychological thriller, Lapid has created an agonized protagonist who is looking for a serial killer—a man who bears a disturbing resemblance to him and competes with him for the same woman`s love. In order to find him, he must fight for principles he no longer believes in and struggle against an establishment that is not actually interested in the truth.
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“ It is very rare for a writer to reinvent himself, but this is just what Yair Lapid has done in Sunset in Moscow... From the very first page, readers find themselves sinking into a nightmarish, crumbling, stifling world… welcome to post-Soviet Moscow, the Inferno of anarchy.”
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“ A sophisticated, gripping and enjoyable novel... its content is truly first-rate. It combines Lapid`s excellent feuilletonist style with a sharp and vivid eye as well as an intricate, inventive design. The controversial character of Arkady... is a literary work of art... Sunset in Moscow is a sort of intellectual exercise laid out on the chessboard of the detective genre...”