Excerpt from The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Any good?"

"I haven't read it," I said. "I don't want the text to influence my interpretation."

A sixth confection dissolved into a starchy paste that sopped the saliva from my tongue. We were quiet for a little while.

"You heard about Lydia?" I finally asked.

All the blush in a beauty box wouldn't've brightened Galina's cheeks. "Yes," she said. Her eyes fixed on a safe, vacant patch of wall over my left shoulder. "Alina told me about her and her mother, and of course your brother. Then Olga told me. Then Lara. Then Darya. Then Zlata. And Tamara must've told me a dozen times"—the six-member gaggle that feasted on crumbs fallen from the table of Galina's celebrity; Lydia had been their seventh member—"I don't even know how they get my number. I change it every few months, mainly to avoid them, and they still somehow find it. The Americans should hire them to track down Al Qaeda. Ten minutes on the phone with Tamara is enough to make anyone disavow their most sacred beliefs"—she lit an incense stick that smelled of lavender fields doused in sunshine—"but anyway, Lydia. Let's be honest, never the sharpest bayonet in the battalion, was she? I'm not saying she should've known better than to confide in them. But, come on. You could confide a secret to a megaphone and it would stay quieter. I've tried to make a film of her murder, but it's easier coaxing a mouse down a cat's throat than a decent script into production."

"It's a tragedy," I said. "For Lydia, for Vera, for Kolya, for—"

"You don't need to tell me. It's a national embarrassment, really, our film industry. If there is an afterlife, then the circle of hell just below the Satan-Judas-Brutus gang bang is reserved for development executives, I mean—"

"Why am I here?" I shrank a little in the crosshairs of her narrowed eyes. She wasn't used to being interrupted.

"A good question, Little Radish, taking us to the heart of the matter—though why those with the most free time are the stingiest with it, I'll never know." She scooted her chair toward my side of the table. She even made scooting sound sexy. I was pretty sure she wanted me to become her paramour. I'm flattered, I'd tell her, but I can't do that to my brother, Kolya, even if he's dead. She'd dissolve into inconsolable weeping, saying if she couldn't have me she had no reason to go on. Buck up, I'd tell her. I'd kiss her right on the lips— with tongue— and she'd swoon, obviously. Then I'd walk out the door without looking back. "So listen," she said, sliding her hand across the table until the space between her fingers and mine was as thin as a butterfly wing. "I went to Chechnya a few years back. With Oleg. He had some business there, drilling oil and his assistant. The tart. While he was out doing that, I visited a few army hospitals and bases. I thought starring in a Great Patriotic War biopic was enough, but no, my publicist insisted that I had to actually talk to the poor devils. A pair of jackboots away from being a wunderbar stormtrooper himself, my publicist. Anyway, I asked an army official about your brother." "I've asked after Kolya with every army official in every army office with a listed address and phone number. No one knows anything." "You're just the sweetest, aren't you? " Her eyes iced over. "When you're an important person, you can ask a question and even an army bureaucrat will answer." She reached across the table and sealed my fingers within the warm envelope of her hand. Her pulse clicked against my wrist like a telegraph message her heart had sent me to decode. My nerve endings gasped. "I was told that he was taken prisoner and died on that field"—she nodded to the wall where a frame of golden dollops and curlicues wrapped around a simple painting of a pasture—"The field is something of a local landmark because it was the subject of this painting by some nineteenth-century artist. Rather dreary place if this is its most majestic vista. But it used to hang in a museum, so it must be important. I bought it."

Excerpted from The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. Copyright © 2015 by Anthony Marra. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.