Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Moscow 1934, and ancient city being transformed into a Soviet utopia by the white heat of the revolution. At least that’s the surface image, the underlying reality is darker and frequently more dangerous.
A fact of which Anton Markovich Belkin, a criminal investigator in the employ of the state is only too aware. Compromised by his family background and the choices he made during Russia’s civil war he lives with one eye forever looking over his shoulder for potential threats.
His latest investigation, into the death by torture of an academic working on the ambitious plan to build the city’s new metro system could make those threats into a deadly reality. To identify the killer, he must descend into the caverns, ancient and modern, underneath Moscow, and the murkier depths of the rivalries within the Communist regime.
In this novel Catherine Merridale delivers a gripping mystery and an entirely convincing portrait of a city where history and grandiose plans for a future built around an inflexible ideology collide. She also captures the insidious paranoia of the Stalinist era, a time when even the vaguest insinuation of potential disloyalty could be a death sentence.
Belkin, a man burdened with his past decisions and an unquiet conscience is the perfect central character to send down the mean street of the looking glass world of Russia on the cusp of the Stalinist purges. Hopefully this will not be the last outing for a character with the potential to develop in interesting ways.
Moscow Underground has drawn entirely deserved comparisons with, among other books, Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. Just as that book builds a powerful narrative around the slow decline of the Soviet system, this one does the same for its brutal heyday.
