This was just the book I have been itching to read: fast, thrilling, compelling, intriguing, and with a backdrop of Stalinist Russia and the Gulags. Right up my alley!
The book gets the reader hooked immediately with a powerful encounter between two young boys (brothers) in Stalinist Russia in 1933. The scene almost immediately fast forwards twenty years to a murder investigation in Moscow. The story unfolds quickly and with lurid details of what it was like to be one of the higher-ups, Leo, in the MGB, State Security Force, which under Lenin was the NKVD (secret police).
Leo is brought into the story to investigate the death of a young boy on the local train tracks. He is convinced that the boy was murdered, although he cannot persue this line of thought because there is no crime in the perfect Soviet society. Everyone is equal, taken care of and has no reason to be anything but happy and content. Murder is not possible in such a society.
I am not going to tell the whole plot line, but suffice it to say that this book gives a vivid portrait of life in Stalinist Russia and the fear, paranoia and violence that was rampant.
Sometimes it seemed overdone, overstated, but being a Russian major and having studied Solzhenitsyn and others, I was aware of the atrocities that took place and the repression that was part of everyday life. Some of the action is a bit far fetched, but I recall real life stories of what people can do and accomplish when under duress and when facing death.
The loose ends are all tied up neatly (too neatly?) in the end and pave the way for more thrillers from this new author.
