Vlaštovky z Černobylu – Audic Morgan (2023)

The twisted manner of the murder of a certain Leonid Sokolov, whose corpse is displayed like a flag on the facade of a tall building, grabs the reader's attention right at the beginning of the novel. They are immediately drawn into a thrilling hunt for the murderer, who leaves a stuffed swallow at the crime scene as a signature. Without iodine pills or the necessary decontamination, they find themselves directly at the site of the 1986 disaster in Chernobyl. The air still carries the threat of the invisible, a memory of the apocalypse and a segment of our history that this literary genre has yet to explore. In his second detective novel, Audic masterfully constructs a captivating story set in the present day while looking back thirty years into the past. Captain Josef Melnyk from the Ukrainian police and Russian mixed-blood Rybalko as a private detective investigate the crime in the city of Pripyat, once the showcase of the Soviet Union. The era of communism is still firmly intertwined with contemporary Ukraine, marked by geopolitical conflicts, economic crises, and social and national transformations.