A Gentle Axe
St Petersburg in the Winter of 1866. Two frozen bodies are found in Petrovsky Park.
The first – that of a dwarf – has been packed neatly in a suitcase, a deep wound splitting his skull in two. The second body, of a burly peasant, is hanging from a nearby tree, a bloody axe tucked into his belt.
Magistrate Porfiry Petrovich – investigating his first murder case since the homicides recorded in Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ – suspects the truth may be more complex than others wish him to believe.
Porfiry’s investigation leads him from the squalid tenements, brothels and drinking dens of the city’s Haymarket district to an altogether more genteel stratum of society.
As he gets deeper and deeper in, the connections between the two spheres begin to multiply, while his anger and his terror mount.
A Vengeful Longing
It is 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 in excruciating pain.
The doctor is arrested, suspected of poisoning.
But when further, apparently unconnected, murders occur, a subtle and surprising pattern starts to emerge.
Porfiry is forced to reassess his assumptions and follow a tenuous, uncertain trail, encountering aristocrats, soldiers, lunatics, bureaucrats and courtesans.
A Razor Wrapped in Silk
Autumn, St Petersburg, 1870.
A child factory worker is mysteriously abducted. A society beauty is sensationally murdered.
The former is barely noticed by the authorities. The latter draws the full investigative might of St Petersburg’s finest, led by magistrate Porfiry Petrovich.
The dead woman had many powerful friends, including at least one member of the Romanov family.
And when the tsar’s notorious secret police become involved, it seems that most crimes may have a political – not to say revolutionary aspect.
The Cleansing Flames
Easter, 1872. St Petersburg in flames. The fires are a prelude to the revolutionary turmoil that will shake Russia a generation later.
As the springtime thaw begins, a body rises to the surface of the Winter Canal. Following an anonymous tip-off, Magistrate Porfiry Petrovich is drawn into an investigation of the radical intellectuals who seek to fan the flames of revolution.
Meanwhile junior magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky plays a dangerous game.
Following a chance meeting with a man he suspects of being an arsonist, Virginsky volunteers to infiltrate a terrorist cell.
Two generations come head to head in a shocking and violent confrontation.
R.N. Morris is the author of the Porfiry Petrovich series of historical crime novels, featuring the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment. He has also written six novels set in London in 1914: Summon Up The Blood, The Mannequin House, A Dark Palace, The White Feather Killer and The Music Box Enigma. His latest novel is Fortune’s Hand, a novel about Walter Raleigh.
Praise for Roger Morris:
"A poignant finish to an exemplary series." The Independent
“Morris has created an atmospheric St Petersburg, and a stylish set of intellectual problems, but what makes A Gentle Axe such an effective debut is its fascination with good and evil.” Times Literary Supplement
“Morris’s descriptions of the horrors of insanitary slum dwellings in St Petersburg are extraordinarily vivid, but the most striking feature of the novel is the way in which Porfiry’s sophisticated understanding of human nature compensates for the limited investigatory tools at his disposal.” The Times
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