The Investigator is set in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1950s. With Stalin at the helm, the post-war Soviet Union is struggling to rebuild and to heal the nation of its multiple wounds. Plots and conspiracies abound and challenges to socialist values, real and imagined, proliferate.
A young woman is murdered in a typical Soviet town. In the spirit of the era everyone is a suspect. The investigator of the title sets out to solve the crime. A former intelligence officer who seeks to embody the ideals of the young Soviet Union, he introduces the reader to a polyphony of alternative voices that, together with his own, weave the unique fabric of this striking novel.

Margarita Khemlin is a Russian Jewish author, born in Chernigov, Ukraine, whose novels have been shortlisted for Russia's foremost literary prizes - the Russian Booker Prize and the Big Book Prize. Initially, Khemlin washed dishes in a café to allow her to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Now, many manuscripts later, she is a prolific and celebrated novelist in today's Russia. Since 2012 Khemlin had also been one of the jurors of the O'Henry Award in the USA.The Investigator is the first winner of the GLOBEX bank grant for translation and publication in English.