Every month Amazon sends out a list of a hundred books for Kindle for under four dollars. This list is almost irresistable. Every month I go through it again and again and usually end up buying an old favorite or another in a series that I am following. This time I made of list of things that looked intriguing, and bought the first one on the list.
It wasn't exactly what I expected. I thought it would probably be a Russian police procedural - even after reading the reviews - sort of Gorky Parkish. Not exactly.
It is set after World War II, at the end of the Stalin era. In fact, the death of Stalin figures into the story. It is fairly convoluted, but, if improbably so, not incomprehensibly. Our hero, Leo, is an agent of some predecessor of the KGB, but is condemned ostensibly for refusing to denounce his wife, actually for having made an enemy of the wrong man. They do get away with their lives, but that is only the beginning of their troubles. There is a serial killer murdering children, but institutionalized paranoia prevents the many local jurisdictions from connecting the dots. In all cases, the murders have been "solved" and the supposed perpetrators summarily executed.
This is a society where paranoia is an essential survival skill. Everyone, no matter who they are, lives in constant fear. That alone made it very tense reading and quite outweighs the tension of the long string of murders and Leo's unsanctioned search for the killer.
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