Samson Kolechko Investigates / Kyiv Mysteries Books in Order

The Samson Kolechko Investigates series, also published as the Kyiv Mysteries, takes Andrey Kurkov’s dry humor and moves it into 1919 Kyiv. The city is exhausted by war and revolution. Governments change, armies move through, food is scarce, and ordinary people are trying to survive while each new authority insists that it is the one bringing order.

Samson Kolechko is not a born detective. He is a young man whose engineering life is violently interrupted when his father is killed and Samson himself is injured by Cossacks. He loses an ear, but not quite in the usual way. That severed ear becomes one of the series’ strangest tools, allowing Kurkov to add a small piece of the uncanny to otherwise grounded historical crime.

The first book, The Silver Bone, puts Samson into the new police force almost by accident. Red Army soldiers have taken over his home, the city’s institutions are shaky, and a report he writes brings him to the attention of investigators. Soon he is looking into murders tied to an enormous suit, a silver bone, and people who may be using the chaos for their own purposes.

Samson’s greatest ally is Nadezhda, a sharp statistician working on the city census. Their relationship gives the books warmth without turning them soft. Nadezhda understands systems, numbers, and people, while Samson is careful, anxious, and more decent than the world around him often rewards. Later books also bring in figures such as Kholodny, a former priest turned police colleague, and officials whose demands are rarely simple or safe.

Kyiv matters on every page.

Kurkov uses the mysteries to show how daily life works when the state is unstable. People carry different currencies. Food rules become life-or-death matters. A missing group of soldiers can be both a criminal puzzle and a political crisis. In The Stolen Heart, an investigation into illegal meat sales grows into something more personal and dangerous. In The Lost Soldiers, Samson faces the bizarre disappearance of Red Army men from a bathhouse, with only uniforms and boots left behind.

These are historical mysteries, but they do not feel dusty. The cases are odd and sometimes darkly funny, yet the pressure around them is real. Samson wants justice, or at least a small working version of it, while the regime he serves keeps asking for obedience instead. That tension gives the series its bite.

Start with The Silver Bone. The books build Samson’s job, his relationship with Nadezhda, and his changing view of power step by step.