Features

A classic revisited: Gorky Park

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Ronald Reagan was steering his course to the White House when Gorky Park came out in 1981. Meanwhile, an ageing autocrat called Leonid Brezhnev, with mighty eyebrows, was the General Secretary of the USSR. In the West, we worried about mutually assured nuclear armageddon. The…
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Red Winter

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Written by Dan Smith — Dan Smith’s previous novel The Child Thief, an intense thriller set among the Bolshevik-infested forests of 1930’s Ukraine, was one of my novels of 2012, so I had high expectations for Red Winter. And I’m glad to say that it more…
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The Twelfth Department

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Written by William Ryan — Moscow, 1937, and the hand of Stalin’s empire lies heavily on every street, boulevard, public park, apartment block and factory in the city. And on every citizen. None more so than Captain Alexei Korolev of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department….
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The Distinguished Assassin

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Written by Nick Taussig — While reading this novel about life in Stalin’s Soviet Russia, I was reminded very strongly of Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. This is deliberate, as the author has explained on his blog. As a postgraduate student of Russian literature in London,…
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A Cold Red Sunrise

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Written by Stuart M Kaminsky — Kaminsky was one of the most prolific and versatile American mystery writers. During his more than 30 years of writing crime fiction, he created four long-standing detective series set in Hollywood (Toby Peters), Chicago (Lieberman), Florida (Lew Fonesca) and…
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