Meruyert Alonso

Meruyert Alonso

Meruyert Alonso is a Kazakhstani writer, philologist and journalist from Karaganda. Before turning to literature, she worked as a journalist, correspondent and columnist, writing for glossy magazines and online publications. Over the years she has lived in Uzbekistan, Peru, England, Spain and Kazakhstan, and this experience of life in different countries has found its way directly into her fiction.
She made her literary debut in 2018 with the short-story collection “The Short Summer of Chanticleer”. The book was built around memories of people, small towns, childhood and events that gradually fade from memory. According to NTK, the entire first print run of 1,000 copies sold out within minutes on the day of its launch in Almaty.
What sets Alonso’s prose apart is its attention not so much to “big events” as to private human lives. She is drawn to people who usually remain on the margins of literature: neighbours, acquaintances, women, children, chance encounters, residents of small towns. In this sense, her prose is an attempt to preserve a vanishing reality – people, conversations, places, smells, everyday details, personal memory. This is exactly how the author herself explained the origins of “The Short Summer of Chanticleer”: she wanted to “bring back to life” people and events that were gradually slipping from memory.
After her first book, another important strand of her work emerged: children’s literature. Her published books include “The Adventures of a Girl Named Chloé”, which she wrote for her older daughter.
In 2024 she published her first novel, “Permitted Forms of Love”, a work of magical realism. The novel took about four years to write and grew out of the author’s experience of living in different countries: Peru, England, Spain and Uzbekistan. At its heart are people, and women in particular – their relationships, coming of age, loss, love and the right to be oneself.
In August 2026 she published the detective novel “Case No. 43. The Crocodile Game”, the first instalment in a series featuring investigator Iskander Khas. He and his team investigate crimes in different regions of present-day Kazakhstan. The novel draws attention to serious, pressing problems facing society today: the first instalment, for example, explores the melting of glaciers and the thermal pollution of the Trans-Ili Alatau region and the city of Almaty.
Meruyert Alonso is also the creator of several projects: the Drugoi Tekst writers’ lab (literary courses), the Drugoi Tekst publishing house and the Room 15 book club.
She is a member of the Eurasian Creative Guild (London).
She currently lives in Madrid, Spain. She is married and is raising three children.

Sales:
“The Short Summer of Chanticleer” – over 3,000 copies
“Permitted Forms of Love” – over 3,000 copies
“Case No. 43. The Crocodile Game” – over 500 copies sold so far (the book was launched on 21 August)

Language of publication: Russian

Synopsis of Meruyert Alonso’s detective novel “Case No. 43. The Crocodile Game” (Book 1)

NB. Meruyert Alonso has created a hero in the tradition of Erast Fandorin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and others. Our Kazakhstani investigator, Iskander Khas, lives in Almaty with his mother and works at the Medeu District Police Department. He has no interest in a personal life; he has an outstanding career and a reputation as the best investigator on the force. Khas’s team includes the profiler Leyla, the pathologist Bekmurzatov and the head of the department, nicknamed “Corleone”. Future books in the series will follow investigations in other regions of Kazakhstan, such as Karaganda and Shymkent.
Each novel will also highlight the pressing problems of its region – such as the melting glacier in Book 1.

Almaty wakes up to horrifying news: human remains have been found high in the mountains of the Trans-Ili Alatau. Soon more fragments are discovered on the Bogdanovich Glacier – each one left as if the killer were deliberately handing the investigation its next clue.
The investigation is led by Iskander Khas. The nature of the crime suggests that the killer has medical knowledge, acts with chilling precision and knows the mountains intimately. But most disturbing of all, he knows far too much about Khas and seems to anticipate his every move.
A young profiler, Leyla Khasenova, joins the investigation. Together they gradually uncover a link between the current murders and the disappearance five years earlier of a young researcher, Aida Satybaldina, who went missing near the same glacier in January 2021.
The investigation leads Khas to old archives, vanished evidence and secrets kept for years within the system itself. Gradually it becomes clear that the killer has been murdering and assembling his collection like a true archivist.
The killer turns his attention to Leyla and summons her to a meeting on the glacier, intending to kill her, but dies in an accident in the mountains. Leyla is injured but survives. The case is closed. But the final scene changes the whole story:
Stuck in traffic on Al-Farabi Avenue, an unknown man listens to a radio report on the closing of the “Crocodile Game” case. He hears that the accused has been found dead. The man calmly switches stations, smiles and says: “The experiment was a success.” The reader realises that the archivist was not alone.
The city goes back to its ordinary life. And somewhere nearby remains a man for whom murder is a scientific experiment.

What makes the novel unique
“Case No. 43. The Crocodile Game” is an unusual Kazakhstani psychological thriller in which a detective investigation is interwoven with the atmosphere of Almaty and the Trans-Ili Alatau, archaeology, Tengrist burial practices and the theme of family memory. The killer turns the crime into a game with the investigators, and the glacier into a kind of archive in which the past is preserved. In short, it offers complete immersion in the Kazakhstani setting.
As the investigation unfolds, the case of the remains found in the mountains becomes personal for Iskander Khas and leads him to the secrets of his own family and a hidden history.
Another distinctive feature: the young profiler Leyla Khasenova is Khas’s intellectual partner and a heroine in her own right. The finale centres on her.
The novel is a blend of genres – detective fiction, psychological thriller and literary fiction – drawing on ancient ideas about death, memory and the preservation of the human being, and turning to the Tengrist tradition and the archaeology of Kazakhstan.

Target readership:
Men and women aged 25–45 who read detective fiction, psychological thrillers and contemporary fiction with a strong plot – especially readers interested in unusual crimes, the psychology of the criminal, the investigation itself and local cultural context.