Praise for Punishment of A Hunter: 'The most successful retro-detective since Akunin' Literratura 'Gritty and gripping' Will Ryan 'It will pull you in and leave you breathless' Chris Lloyd 'Yulia Yokovleva's thrilling debut was a bestseller in her native Russia. It's not difficult to see why' The Times, Best New Crime Fiction ________________ On the eve of Stalin's deadly great purge, a rider and his horse mysteriously collapse in the middle of a race in Leningrad. Weary detective Zaitsev, still reeling from his last brush with the Party, is dispatched to the soviet state cavalry school near Ukraine to investigate. There he witnesses the horror of the man-made Holodomor Famine as he struggles to penetrate the murky, secretive world of the school. Why has this murder attracted so much attention from Soviet officials? Zaitsev needs to answer this question and solve the case before the increasingly paranoid authorities turn their attention to him...

1930s Leningrad. As a mood of fear cloaks the city, Investigator Vasily Zaitsev is called on to investigate a series of bizarre and seemingly motiveless murders. In each case, the victim is curiously dressed and posed in extravagantly arranged settings. At the same time, one by one precious old master paintings are going missing from the Hermitage collection. As Zaitsev sets about his investigations, he meets with suspicion at practically every turn, and potential witnesses are reluctant to provide information. Soon Zaitsev himself comes under suspicion from the Soviet secret police. The embittered detective must battle increasingly complex political machinations in his dogged quest to uncover the truth.

"Phiscultura" presents not just Katsuba's own work, color photographs of contemporary Russian athletes posed in Speedos and piled into gymnastic pyramids, but his inspiration, K. Bulla's late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs of earlier generations of athletes, from the St. Petersburg's State Archive. The juxtaposition enhances the characteristics of Russia's past and future.