A review by kitnotmarlowe
Punishment of a Hunter by Yulia Yakovleva

Did not finish book. Stopped at 52%.

If I'm butter, then bad historical mysteries are a hot knife. 

 

I gave up on Punishment of a Hunter halfway through, and the fact that I have few criticisms speaks louder than a laundry list. It's simply a dull book. Yulia Yakovleva wrote nothing for 400 pages. And I don't think this is because the story's heart was lost in translation; I think it's because there wasn't one to begin with.

 

As I said, I read over 200 pages of Punishment of a Hunter, and I have no idea why the reader is supposed to care about either the core team of detectives or the actual murder victims. There's no reason for readers to care about any of this. I don't know how anyone could care because nothing human or even interesting happened in 200 pages. The timeline is deeply, almost mind-bogglingly deranged. He spends several months in a Soviet prison before being released in the next paragraph for no apparent reason other than to speed up the passage of time. This time in prison has zero effect on his psyche, interpersonal relationships, worldbuilding, or even (somehow) the timeline itself. It reads like Yakovleva developed by the seat of her pants. She plots with the mortal terror of someone who stumbled into an improv group and is too polite to leave. 

And the writing itself. Woof. It's just so dull. It's so, so, so monotonously, mind-numbingly, infuriatingly boring. I could get more educational and entertainment value from reading a phone book. 

 

In Chapter 1, we get this brief introduction to Zaitsev: "Zaitsev was none other than Detective Vasily Zaitsev, Comrade Zaitsev. Known only to his close colleagues in Squad 2 as Vasya." 

Aside from Zaitsev's lack of a patronymic, addressed in the next chapter and likely a thread throughout the rest of the book, this tells us nothing the reader does not already know. Aside from that, it's just a bunch of meaningless words. Neither the characters nor the narrative appears to care about the murders, which is certainly a choice for a police procedural.