Department H (Отдел И)

A Novel

Department H cover spread
Department H, by Petar Toushkov

In Department H (Ergo Books, 2015), everything begins in the late November, 1957, when the young lieutenant Ruslan Krieger, deputy head of a metropolitan department – a department as secret as it is supernaturally improbable – takes a series of disturbing photographs of a number of Soviet spies in the autumnal Dobrudja wilderness, Bulgaria.

Click. A man with distorted horn-rimmed spectacles, cut off by an automatic fire. Click. A splattered brain on the wall and the body of a man in civilian clothes with a funny cut from the autumn collection of the USSR’s Main Intelligence Directorate.

Krieger is the perpetual screwup of the department he runs himself in the absence of his suspended direct superior. In the upper echelons of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, he is practising the high art of shirking any responsibility for his actions. This time, however, is different. In the Banishora district, someone has left in his wake yet another unsanctioned corpse, putting it on the department’s payroll. Someone is playing a double game under Krieger’s nose, and nothing – not even another dismissal, surprise blows to the back of the head, irrate superiors, and the constant game of cat and mouse with the all-seeing eyes of the Party – can stop him from digging out the truth and the broken pieces of the unpleasant puzzle called post-war Bulgaria.

Genre: Crime, Alternate History, Speculative Fiction

Read all about Department “H”: petertoushkov.eu/otdel-i

Bluegrass (Блуграс)

A Short Story Collection

Bluegrass cover spread
Bluegrass, by Petar Toushkov

Bluegrass (Ergo Books, 2021) contains 11 carefully selected short stories and the novella “Vazev, 1887”. In “Vazev, 1887”, a strange adventure-romance, the prototype for whose main character is the famous Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov (1850-1921), Bulgaria has lost, instead of winning, the Serbo-Bulgarian War, the state’s capital is besieged by foreign troops, and the government is in ruins. Everything is at stake while our hero, the poet, the writer, and the publicist Yoan Vazev, leads his daily battles from the pages of the City Herald newspaper or, quite frankly, through any other means possible when it comes to truth, justice, and ideals.

Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Alternate History, Speculative Fiction

Read all about Bluegrass: petertoushkov.eu/bluegrass