The Dead Mountaineer Hotel & Roadside Picnic / Отель у Погибшего Альпиниста и Пикник на Обочине
Arkady Strugatsky [Russian: Аркадий Стругацкий] and Boris Strugatsky [Russian: Борис Стругацкий]
Roadside Picnic. Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.
The Dead Mountaineer Hotel. When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at the
remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get
involved in any police work. He’s there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf
around in blissful solitude.
But he hadn’t counted on the other
vacationers, an eccentric bunch including a famous hypnotist, a
physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of
indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses. And as the
chalet fills up, strange things start happening—things that seem to
indicate the presence of another, unseen guest. Is there a ghost on the
premises? A prankster? Something more sinister? And then an avalanche
blocks the mountain pass, and they’re stuck.
Which is just about
when they find the corpse. Meaning that Glebksy’s vacation is over and
he’s embarked on the most unusual investigation he’s ever been involved
with. In fact, the further he looks into it, the more Glebsky realizes
that the victim may not even be human.
In this late novel from
the legendary Russian sci-fi duo the Strugatskys gleefully upend the plot of many a Hercule
Poirot mystery—and the result is much funnier, and much stranger, than
anything Agatha Christie ever wrote.