The Beast

October 2022, 520 pages

Rights sold to: Poland (Afera)

Available material: English summary

Political murder-for-hire or a serial killer has risen from the dead?

The minister of the interior verbally assaults a young journalist who has been writing about his alleged connection to the political underworld. The threat-filled conflict is caught on camera, sparking a major media scandal. A few days later, the journalist and his girlfriend are murdered. All signs point to a contract killing, but the execution of the latter’s murder carries a resemblance to a series of unsolved murders committed in the Šumperk region seven years earlier.

Chief investigator Laura Ara and her colleagues (including Václav Cesta, whom readers will know from the crime novel Hear the Stags Singing) wade through a morass of political mafia, godfathers, and lobbyists with links to foreign criminal gangs. Was the killer’s motive as simple as to silence an inconvenient journalist or is it something more?

The chief investigator Laura Ara’s first part series