The sympathetic and flawed lead character puts a haunting human face on contemporary Russia, often demonized by the media.
A successful businessman’s involvement with a woman determined to rescue sex trafficking victims exposes the underbelly of the New Russia in this noir-esque character study.
Nikolai Delov, pushing age 50, co-owns with his brother “the largest family-owned trucking company in the Russian Federation,” a company his truck driver father founded. Delov is a public success. He proudly displays a photo of himself receiving an entrepreneurial award from President Boris Yeltsin (“A perfect example of what a renewed Russia is all about”). His private life, though, is in more of a shambles. Divorced, he suffers strained relations with his son, Valentin, a talented artist with no interest in joining the family business, who is trying to open his own gallery. One morning, Delov is visited by Inessa Zorina, who runs a foundation that provides “ ‘safe environments’ for girls escaping the sex trade.” In their initial meeting, she is simply seeking a financial donation to establish housing for the young women, but things get interesting when she prevails upon him to help her rescue a young woman from her pimp. The entrepreneur’s growing relationship with Zorina puts him at further odds with powerful business rival Vladimir Konstantinov, the scion of a Yeltsin-era oligarch. Delov uses this competitor as a benchmark to measure his own success (“An unfair standard…since Vladimir Konstantinov was anything but a truck driver’s son”). Is Konstantinov jealous of Delov and Zorina’s affair? Is it just a coincidence that Valentin is arrested and charged with being a Banksey-like covert graffiti-tagger? In a striking plot development, Delov himself comes under investigation when it appears a branch of his company is involved in the trafficking of young women. Dante (The Tiger’s Wedding, 2012) has crafted an engrossing novel with an evocative and authentic sense of place and an engaging protagonist facing myriad challenges (“If something dire happened to him, what might become of the company?”). In noir tradition, Delov finds his world upended by dark forces of which he is aware but had always been able to navigate. “Corruption is a terrible thing,” he notes at one point, “until it works in your favor.” That is a statement as true in Putin-era Russia as it was in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago.
The sympathetic and flawed lead character puts a haunting human face on contemporary Russia, often demonized by the media.Pub Date: July 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-91225-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Omsk Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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