Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street [Paperback]

This rediscovered masterpiece captures a chilling moment in the stifling early days of Communist Czechoslovakia.

1950s Prague is a city of numerous daily terrors, of political tyranny, corruption and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one’s neighbor is spying for the government, or what one’s supposed friend will say to a State Security agent under pressure. A loyal Party member might be imprisoned or executed as quickly as a traitor; innocence means nothing for a person caught in a government trap. When a little boy is murdered at the cinema, the ensuing investigation sheds a little too much light on the personal lives of the cinema’s female ushers, each of whom is hiding a dark secret of her own.Praise forInnocence; or, Murder on Steep Street

An NPR Best Book of 2015

A luminous testament from a dark time, Innocence is at once a clever hommage to Raymond Chandler, and a portrait of a city—Prague—caught and held fast in a state of Kafkaesque paranoia. Only a great survivor could have written such a book.
—John Banville

The great draw of Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street is the menacing view it gives us of communist Prague . . . Kovály channels Chandler but takes him into a landscape far, far away from wide-open L.A.
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR'sFresh Air

An extraordinary novel . . . A remarkable work of art with the intrigue of a spy puzzle, the irony of a political fable, the shrewdness of a novel of manners, and the toughness of a hard-boiled murder mystery.
—Tom Nolan,The Wall Street Journal

A sharp, moving indictment of Soviet-style communism, and of any ideology that relies on fear to subdue.
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

The plot is easy to envision as film noirlƒ$