Maria Dolon

#chernaya_polka
#chernye_delfiny
#v_chernom_tele
#chernaya_maska
#black_shelf
#black_dolphins
#black_pill
#black_mask
Women‘s detective series. Eksmo. Moscow 2018. Approx. 350 pages each

The main character is the Moscow investigative journalist Inga Belova. Due to a scandal, she and her photographer col- league Oleg were dismissed from the glossy magazine QQ. Inga has since tried her luck as a freelance investigative video blogger. She encounters strange incidents, mostly in her immediate private environment, in which the police see no reason to investigate. Thus Inga herself begins with investigations. Among her supporters are her photographer colleague and fri- end Oleg, forensic scientist Kholodikver, detective Kirill Arkharov and a mysterious IT guy who hides behind the pseudonym Indiwind and makes special requests for Inga for a small fee: researching addresses, telephone numbers and personal data, cracking passwords, checking the accuracy of information, etc.

Inga herself has the rare gift of seeing spoken words as colours and thus their emotional colouring (similar to synaesthesia). As helpful as this is in her research, as disturbing is it in her private live. Since she cannot turn it off, she also analyses tele- phone calls with her mother or daughter in clairvoyant commentaries, which also makes subplots in the novel entertaining and funny.

With the young Inga Belova, the female author collective succeeds in creating a modern, authentic main heroine: thoro- ughly honest and soberly analytical, cheeky, thoughtful and reliable, willing to take risks to the brink of illegality, insistent to the point of stubbornness. As the single mother of a pubescent daughter, we also experience her from her vulnerable, self-doubting side. As a divorced single woman, she attracts the attention of men not only because of her research: ex-hus- band, best friend and colleague, old classmate, detective and others. Or is it Inga who gives herself a certain hope? The consistent further development of the main heroine Inga not only succeeds very convincingly as a single mother, but also as a „left alone“ woman.

In terms of content, the authors of the collective always focus on very up-to-date topics: international art trade in connection with robbery and counterfeiting, demolition of entire residential quarters in Moscow in connection with land speculation, influence of social networks on the psyche (discussion about depression), etc. Each time they prove their ability to compose the theme into an intelligently entangled plot with several unexpected twists and turns and, moreover, to very cleverly lay the wrong tracks. The main plot in all cases takes place in today‘s Moscow. Its streets, squares, quarters and backyards, described in detail, provide the concretely recognizable crime scenes for the series.

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