KindlePrintReviews

White Fox by Owen Matthews

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White Fox is the third novel to feature Russian KGB officer Alexander Vasin, a man much like Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, in that he has had the bad luck to be born with a moral sense and independent streak while serving within a totalitarian regime….
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

The Mercenary by Paul Vidich

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The Mercenary is the fourth novel in Paul Vidich’s Cold War espionage series featuring CIA officer George Mueller, which began with An Honorable Man in 2016. Vidich appears to be following the lead of his illustrious predecessor in that, like John le Carré’s George Smiley,…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

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First published in 2008, Child 44 put Tim Rob Smith on the map as an author of taut, gritty crime fiction. Like Gorky Park, it used Soviet Russia as its backdrop – with all the nuances of communist justice. Also like Gorky Park it’s now been…
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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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iBookKindlePrintReviews

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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iBookKindlePrintReviews

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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PrintReviews

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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