Innocence, or, Murder on Steep Street

Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator and political exile Heda Margolius Kovly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague: her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution and her own persecution at his disgrace, into a smart and evocative psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself.