THE BURNING LAKE

For brooding Russian agent Alexei Volkovoy, the murder of a beautiful journalist is personal.

On a bitter winter night in Moscow, "Volk" gets the news that he has long expected: Internationally acclaimed Russian journalist Katarina Mironova, aka Kato, has been shot dead in the street. Writer Ilya Jakobs, the elderly dissident who informs him, points out that Kato is the 22nd journalist murdered under Putin. It's unsettling to Volk that Ilya senses (or knows) the closeness of his relationship with Kato, which he thought he'd kept secret. Similarly, Volk's vulnerable lover Valya intuits his intimacy with the beautiful Kato and asks whether they'd had an affair. Volk lies as much to protect her as himself, but his close call doesn't prevent him from investigating her murder, which includes many flashbacks to their smoldering relationship and the work that ultimately cost her her life. Ironically, Volk's visit to the Kremlin and a meeting with an imperious figure he calls "The General" leads to his being officially given the assignment. Meanwhile, brutal American agent Grayson Stone, who heads an elite intelligence squad outside the strictures of the NSA or CIA, is methodically torturing Delveccio, a coarse crime boss he's convinced holds the key to murdered drug runners. When Volk learns the identity of the assassin, his discovery puts him squarely in the cross hairs of Stone's scorched-earth determination.

Ghelfi's punchy noir prose holds his fourth Volk novel (The Verona Cable, 2009, etc.) together, and the plot is appealingly twisty, albeit full of stock characters and developments.