Details
| Size | | Length: | 373 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 24.0 oz |
Industry Reviews
'The dead weight of the past lay across him like a toppled statue,' a dejected cop reflects blearily, well short of the end of Harris' new thriller. He could be speaking for Russia. . . . Kelso and a TV reporter head up . . . [to Archangel], followed by the cop, followed by military thugs. What they find, to no one's surprise, is that not everyone in the new, modern Russia thinks Stalin was a bloodstained disaster. . . . Harris, a master of umbrous what-ifs, is at his best here.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Skow
Just as in Harris's first blockbuster, 'Fatherland,' which was premised on Nazi Germany's victory in World War II, [the] quasi-historical backdrop is a nifty device. The main protagonists are perfectly at odds with each other. . . . Harris splices in glimpses of the new Russia and its splashy wealth, decadence and desperation. As Kelso races across Moscow and then to Russia's far north to discover Stalin's secret, readers will need to suspend their disbelief at times. But thriller lovers are used to this. What they may not realize is how accurate Kelso's portrayal of Stalin and the monstrous system he created is. And how plausible his--or Harris's--case is that Stalinism is far from buried. Harris has written a zinger precisely because in Russia, past or present, virtually nothing is too absurd to be possible.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Nagorski
As in his first thriller, Fatherland, Harris again plunders the past to tell an icy-slick story set mostly in the present. Readers are plunged into mystery, danger and the affairs of great men at once, as, outside Moscow in 1953, Stalin suffers a fatal stroke, and the notorious Beria, head of Stalin's secret police, orders a young guard to swipe a key from the dictator's body, to stand watch as Beria uses it to steal a notebook from Stalin's safe and then to help bury the notebook deep in the ground. These events unfold not in flashback proper but as told to American Sovietologist C.R.A. "Fluke" Kelso by the guard, now an old drunk. Following a lead from the old man's story as well as other clues, Kelso, soon accompanied by an American satellite-TV journalist, goes in pursuit of the notebook and, later, the explosive secret it contains; others, including those who cherish the days of Stalin's might, are on the chase as well. With this hunt as backbone, the plot fleshes out in muscular fashion, fed by assorted conspiratorial interests and a welter of colorful, if sometimes too obvious (Stalin as madman; Beria as sadist), characters. The crumbling ruin that is today's Moscow comes alive in the details, which continue as Kelso's search moves north into the frozen desolation of the White Sea port of Archangel. Sex, violence and violent sex all play a part in Harris's entertaining, well-constructed, intelligently lurid tale, which, along with his first two novels, places him squarely in the footsteps not of "Conrad, Green and le Carr?," as the publisher would have it, but of Frederick Forsyth. And, like Forsyth, Harris has yet to write a novel without bestseller stamped on it including this one. Simultaneous audio book; optioned for film by Mel Gibson. (Feb.)
White
Harris's first novel, Fatherland (LJ 4/1/92), an international best seller, supposed that Hitler had won World War II. His second, Enigma (LJ 10/1/95), another success, hinged on code-breaking in the same war. In Archangel, Harris switches to modern, unstable Russia and raises another what-if suppose a very real pro-Stalinist cult wanted to bring "back" to power one of Stalin's sons. A discredited Oxford historian and an American TV journalist stumble over papers suggesting such a possibility. They stay barely one jump ahead of sinister competing forces in pursuing a twisting tale that keeps the reader turning pages almost past the bizarre surprises at the end. A former journalist and author of several nonfiction works, Harris skillfully mixes historical detail and fiction. This is likely to be as big a hit as the earlier two suspense tales, and libraries everywhere should be prepared. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/98.] Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Riley
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