The Shooting Party

A Russian country magistrate recounts the murder of the young mistress of a local count, during a shooting party the count had organized for his guests, in an all-new translation of the playwright's only novel. Original.
The Shooting Party, Chekhov's only full-length novel, centres on Olga, the pretty young daughter of a drunken forester on a country estate, and her fateful relationships with the men in her life. Adored by Urbenin, the estate manager, whom she marries to escape the poverty of her home, she is also desired by the dissolute Count Karneyev and by Zinovyev, a magistrate, who knows the secret misery of her marriage. When an attempt is made on Olga's life in the woods, it seems impossible to discover the perpetrator in an impenetrable web of deceit, lust, loathing and double-dealing. One of Chekhov's earliest experiments in fiction, The Shooting Party combines the classic elements of a mystery with a story of corruption, concealed love and fatal jealousy.
The Shooting Party wraps a story of concealed love and fatal jealousy into a classic murder mystery. When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called to investigate. But suspicion descends upon virtually everyone, for, as we soon learn, the victim was at the center of a tangled web of relationships with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself. One of Anton Chekhov´s earliest experiments in fiction, this short, riveting novel prefigures the mature style he would develop in his magnificent stories and plays.