Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street

April 6, 2015
Previously unpublished in English, this mystery by the late Czech translator and author of the memoir Under a Cruel Star vividly depicts Communist-oppressed 1950s Prague. Helena Nováková, whose husband, Karel, has been unjustly imprisoned, works as an usher at the Horizon Cinema. When an eight-year-old boy is stabbed to death at the cinema, the culprit is clearly the projectionist. But when the investigating officer, Captain Nedoma, is also stabbed to death, suspects include Nedoma’s long-suffering wife and his former lover, Marie, another Horizon usher. Everyone at the theater has secrets, including Karla Kourimská, who lives luxuriously despite a modest job. Helena meets a sinister official who promises to look into Karel’s case, while the dogged Lieutenant Vendys seeks Nedoma’s murderer—but even the confession he elicits doesn’t represent the truth. That Kovály’s first husband was unjustly executed by the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1952 gives her narrative of double lives and betrayal a painful veracity.

May 1, 2015

Originally published in Czech in the 1980s under a pseudonym to protect her family, Kovaly's novel is finally being released in English. She wrote this story in secret while working on Czech translations of Raymond Chandler and Philip Roth. Kovaly's acclaimed memoir, Under a Cruel Star, details her time in Auschwitz and the communist purges and show trials in Czechoslovakia following the war. Set in Prague in the 1950s, the book takes place in and around a cinema, the perfect location for a missing-person story that quickly escalates into a murder mystery. The draw here isn't the mystery of who killed the policeman investigating the first murder--even though everyone had a motive and everyone is hiding something--it is the tense atmosphere in which all are guilty of something and yet punished for a different crime. VERDICT Capturing the fear and oppression of living in a police state, this dark novel, reflective of its time and written by a writer who lived her material, will enthrall noir enthusiasts and readers of literary historical fiction.--Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2015
With her husband unjustly in the clink for six more years, Helena is lonely. On Sundays, her days off from the theater where she works as an usher, she reads, thinking that if her life were more like a book, something would have happened. But this novel, inspired by Chandler's Philip Marlowe, also limns what the other ushers are doing on their time off, and in 1950s Prague, something evil is brewing. Maria is having an affair with a married man; Marilyn is leading a double life; the projectionist, Janecek, has murdered a young boy; and someone thinks that Helena knows more than she does. Kovaly, who died in 2010 at 91, wrote a renowned memoir, Under a Cruel Star (1973), about surviving Auschwitz, and this crime novel, originally published under a pseudonym to avoid difficulties for her friends, is based on her experiences, as well. In noirish tones, it depicts the dark streets, the lost souls, and a very difficult time to be judged guilty or innocent by one's supposed friends or by the oppressive and rising Czechoslovakian Communist regime. As Kovaly notes, We always regret what we've lost, even if it was just suffering. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)