‘Murder’s Easy. We Did Something Much Worse.’

There’s a mordant theme to this month’s column; in three of the four books, dark humor undercuts despair and sardonic wit compensates for failure. Nowhere are these traits more on display than in DEATH OF THE RED RIDER (Pushkin Vertigo, 396 pp., paperback, $16.95), the second appearance of Yulia Yakovleva’s Stalin-era detective, Vasily Zaitsev, who goes about the ordinary business of solving murders while communities around him in 1930s Russia are purged and exiled en masse.

This time Zaitsev is dispatched to Novocherkassk, a Soviet cavalry school in the south of Russia, to investigate the horrifying death of a famous rider and his horse midrace. Soon he’s given an assistant he didn’t ask for, Comrade Zoya Sokolova, who arrives with her own agenda. The events — aided by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp’s nimble translation — unfold slowly, but hold the reader’s attention.

Yakovleva captures the futility of living and working in such a blighted society, picking up the torch from Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series. “Murder’s easy,” a man tells Zaitsev. “We did something much worse, all of us. To each other — Russians, Germans, English, French. Not just murder. Extermination — that’s what we did. We learnt that life was worthless. Worth less than a penny. That is a terrible thing.”

A coincidence ties together Yakovleva and August Snow, the Detroit-based private detective who returns for a fourth time in Stephen Mack Jones’s DEUS X (Soho Crime, 352 pp., $27.95): The former lives in Oslo and also writes in Norwegian, while Snow now spends a chunk of the year in Oslo with his partner, Tatina.