Features

Meet the author: Catherine Merridale

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Moscow might not be top of your travel itinerary at the moment, but with crime fiction and historian Catherine Merridale you can safely travel there in your imagination in Moscow Underground. The setup is fascinating. As he consolidates power, Josef Stalin wants to show the…
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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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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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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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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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