Eleven Prague Corpses

Prague is a place where murders happen, and it takes an English-speaking Russian expat with a strong antipathy for the city and its inhabitants to solve the mystery . . . or maybe not. As the plots thicken, the two narrators of Kirill Kobrin’s ten short stories gradually merge into a single hazy, undefined personality, characterized by a passion for logical reasoning, which leads to the identification of the culprit; except that the laboriously constructed murder narrative may stand or fall on a typo, and the mentally satisfying conclusion may or may not have much to do with reality . . .