This is the third novel featuring Moscow CID man Alexei Korolev - an honest man trying to do his job investigating crime at the height of Stalin's Great Terror in 1937. Like its predecessors, this creates very well the atmosphere of oppression and the banality of arbitrary terror in a totalitarian society where even total loyalty to Stalin and the Party line might not be enough to survive. The plot again contains a heady mixture of elements, murder, faction fighting within the state security organs, secret experimentation and a direct threat to Korolev's own twelve year old son, Yuri. There is an eclectic mix of characters and I quite enjoy these novels, though somehow I always have an inchoate feeling that the various plot elements don't hang together as well as they might. One more specific sad reflection that struck me was when Yuri tells his dad that in his school: "Some of the kids’ folks have no books at all – they’re the lucky ones", i.e. because this means their parents are safer from the threat of arbitrary arrest for owning banned literature. ( )

Alexei Korolev, a policeman in Moscow, 1937, is once again drawn into a case where the murderer is less terrifying than the political snares the investigation has to navigate to find them. A scientific director is found shot, but his work was for the security services, meaning that it was both secret and of questionable ethics. It may not even have been particularly scientific, according to his replacement, who ends up stabbed a few days later. Korolev is on the case and then, because a quick and efficient answer is more desirable than an accurate one, he's off it. Then he's back on it again, ostensibly to get to the truth, but also as part of a deadly power struggle between competing security departments. To make matters considerably worse, Korolev's son, Yuri, is missing, and may be in the hands of the institute where unspeakable experiments were performed on men and boys. Korolev doesn't care about himself, he wants to save his son, and catching the killer is less important than finding a way to survive.

Another superb thriller set in Russia at the height of Stalin's Terror. Ordinary lives lived in the shadow of fear and paranoia, and the near impossibility of doing the right thing and getting away with it give this whodunnit a texture of suspense and humanity, and Korolev, the tough but dogged and good-hearted policeman is a hero who can never be out of danger. ( )

If you like Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series or Tom Robb Smith's Child 44, you would like the Alexi Korolev series. Ryan has done lots of research on the Soviet years and it shows. Korolev is a detective in Moscow during the Great Terror years of the 30's. He is genuinely trying to be a loyal Soviet citizen and solve murders. However, most crimes seem to have a political involvement which if he makes the wrong choice could lead to prison or death for himself and his friends and family. Great depection of the mental outlook for Soviets.

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