#marinina

- it takes place in Moscow, starting in 1991

- yes, that’s the very end of the Soviet Union and the very start of the, uh, Bandit Nineties. The economy going to pieces, organized crime surging. Unless I’m mistaken, the organized crime wave ended with the successful crime bosses all becoming legitimate businessmen/politicians, so, you know, yeah. The organized crime won that one.

- (yes, I’m referring to Putin and his crowd. However, the book doesn’t. All the politicians are made up and whenever ‘the president’ comes up, he is left nameless. It’s not political except in acknowledging realities of the time)

- the main character is a cop, in the murder investigation department

- no not like that

- the main character is a thirty-two year old woman (at the start, the series continues iirc into her fifties)

- she is not athletic, has a bad back and bad blood circulation. Also anxiety / impostor syndrome, though that’s mostly unrelated

- she is an analyst, hired by a department head who decided to lean into the whole “we are not legally allowed to do police brutality anymore” thing and do things the smart way instead

- notably, the writer has, actually, herself worked in that, ah, industry, though I believe not in that specific postion. Still, she knows how it works, from formal organization to interpersonal dynamics

- the books are not traditional murder mysteries per se, in that we get clues alongside the main character and have the chance to decipher what really happened along the investigation. The story is multi-POV, shifting not only between the mc and her coworkers, but also between the investigation-ees, including frequently the murderer, frequently immediately named such in the narration. Of course the audience doesn’t get all the answers immediately, but still, it often becomes obvious who did it to the readers way before it does to the mc, and the tension lies more in “will she figure it out, and will it be in time for [...]”

- basically it’s a psychological drama centered around murder investigations

- the series is not what I would call copaganda, on any level. The mc herself does not take bribes (nor is she usually offered them, being too low in the hierarchy), nor does she really take full advantage of the “acquaintanceship” system the whole, er, society runs on, due to aforementioned anxiety / impostor syndrome. But the series is VERY frank about how the system works (not that any Russian/post-soviet reader is surprised by that, as it is VERY frankly how it works. My family has had nice things because of where our family members worked and who they knew, too), and the main character does go through acquaintances instead of official channels to find out information (often information that’s technically illegal for them to give her) approximately half the time. It’s Just How The System Works. Her boss runs on full acquaintanceship system, too, and there’s at least one investigation they “win” by acquiring blackmail on a politician through a con. (A rapist was being protected by his politician relatives...) Police brutality is acknowledged as a thing, Though It’s Illegal Now. Not defended, not condemned, just... there as part of the setting.

- the main character and her coworkers genuinely care about justice, putting away murderers, and so on. However, the series explicitly goes out of its way to reject black and white morality. The criminals are not “the bad guys”, the cops are not “the good guys”. It’s more... law vs chaos. It’s brought up that apparently some of the criminals the mc’s boss had put away later came to see him with a bottle of alcohol because in the process of investigation / arrest he got them out of a bad situation / saved their family / etc. Approximately all of the police structure is hopelessly corrupt, in the sense that the mc’s boss is also very much expected by his colleagues and superiors to play along - and he sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t, depending on the situation. In the case of a guy who raped a 12 year old girl he doesn’t, see the blackmail situation above. He’s buddies with at least one crime boss, with a “you know and I know but you just try to catch me” relationship. (He also lies shamelessly to that crime boss for a scheme where they get a chance to catch an assassin normally protected by the organized crime system)

- the main character’s love life is... very queer. Nobody’s gay (in the main cast, there are gay that-book-only characters later) (unless I forgot someone gay in the main cast, which is possible), but the mc is VERY on the aroace spectrum (complete with the “I’m not a woman, I’m a computer” “I am incapable of normal human emotions” not-quite-angst-as-she-has-just-accepted-it-as-fact-and-is-comfortable-with-it), and her overall situation is very Like That. She’s in a long-term sort-of-relationship with a childhood friend who has a crush on her, but also gets crushes on other women all the time, only to burn out quickly and come back to her complaining about his disappointment in women in general who are not her. This is normal and she is very comfortable in the relationship. Eventually (into her forties I think) they actually get married, because she gets the epiphany that she’s actually happy with him and loves him very much, and romantic feelings can get fucked given she’s not had any since teenagehood. She also sometimes sleeps with men who are not him, and flirts with more, sometimes for work, sometimes for personal reasons, only to inevitably conclude that yeah she’s Too Aroace For This. Zero jealousy is involved.

- other arrangements along these lines also come up in various books, and I think it’s this series that opened my mind way back when to the concept of “marraiage as a platonic cohabitation agreement”. A gay guy who’s married to a woman who has her own adventures and he his own, and they’re best friends and partners and each other’s shoulder to cry on about romantic troubles - this happened at least once.

- the series is occasionally stereotypically “crazy psychopaths” ableist, it certainly is in the first book, but overall it leans more towards a very... incisive take on people just being That Way (with no particular terminology involved). Like the main character’s anxiety (and probably autism tbh, though the writer seems unaware of the concept)

- there are many topics like that. Fatphobia gets a whirl many times, visibly without the writer having any idea that the topic is somehow political or controversial. She’s just writing what she sees, you know? Same with homophobia etc. The writer’s mission is to give black and white morality kick in the nuts and just write How Life Is, and she is just. Very good at it.

- like, the criminals aren’t always The Bad Guys. At least one murderer is a teenage girl who was abused by her father and so desperate to escape, she did Very Stupid Things (if wearing lipstick is as bad as murder...). Her father has understandable motives in turn, though not in an excuse way. The narrative is just genreally very... non-preachy and non-judgemental towards people involved, even people like professional assassins and (worse) professional big bosses who don’t give a second thought to stealing/conning people, and when caught in a blackmail situation because of it only hesitate some before escalating to murder over it, and mostly because of “what if I get caught”

- the understanding of everything is very... societal/systemic, in a very good way. No Shit People Who Live Here Are This Way, the books say every time, while also saying People Have Different Personalities And That’s Normal (and It’s Not The Personality That Makes A Murderer, It’s Personality In Systemic Context)

- like, it’s just... so good, holy shit. While also occasionally being bad in places where the writer is just kind of making shit up and the ignorance is audible (see “psychopath” ableism - the writer is doing her best to write her characters as people with coherent motivations and logic, but she just doesn’t know enough to nail it)

- there is so much... sympathy for like... mundane life situations. A character who’s driven to being an absolute piece of shit by living conditions of “five people in a single-room apartment including a disabled elderly relative you Have to take care of”. And nobody’s demonized? Like. Situations that just suck for everybody involved and nobody’s to blame, particularly. And if someone is, they still get sympathy.

- like... there’s a character who was denied an opportunity in Soviet Union because of the systemic antisemitism, but the guy who got to break her the news was very awkward about it and didn’t want to say the antisemitic thing, so he was ableist about it instead. Oops. That person is a bit character who played an unquestionably negative role, but they still get sympathy from the narrative for their choices - they said the worse-for-this-particular-person thing while trying to avoid, you know. The other thing that’s also very bad.

- i would like to reiterate that the main character is an autistic aspec woman with chronic illnesses who starts at thirty-two and progresses into her fifties over the course of hte narrative.

- (she loses her impostor syndrome along the way, as the book series is very much the “genius detective figuring it all out from tangential clues” genre and her achievements and reputation mount)

- oh yeah, to say that the series tackles sexism is to say that Karl Marx’s “Capital” tackles economic inequality. “People underestimate women and they really shouldn’t” is, according to the writer’s foreword, the original idea that sparkled the premise for the first book and then also the entire series. (”People underestimate fat women and they really shouldn’t” appears as a consistent sub-theme later on as a new prosecutor character enters the scene at some point and sticks around.)