The Shooting Party

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.