BALTIC SHADOWS

Espionage and murder infiltrate this novel that stretches from Toronto to Moscow.

Kalns’ story powerfully demonstrates the deadly side of the Cold War in the late 1980s. Torontonian Gustavs Ziediņš, a member of the city’s Latvian community, works as director of the local English Academy. Assisting him is his sharp-chinned, yellow-toothed, no-nonsense secretary, Renata Pawelski. A widower for five years, 41-year-old Gustavs is next in line to lead the Latvian National Federation of Canada, an organization that assists new immigrants and works with underground dissident groups abroad. Gustavs falls under police suspicion after the federation’s president, Imants Barons, dies unexpectedly. Did alcoholic hepatitis kill Barons, as his “butter blonde” wife, Dagnija, suggests, or was it poison, as the police suspect? Now on the local police’s radar because they think he had a motive to kill Barons, the academy director is stunned when his old friend Šarlote “Lotte” Lazdiņa—“the very essence of Latvian beauty”—asks him to smuggle things “the Russians don’t want seen in the light of day.” A new love affair with married former Kirov ballerina Tatyana Ivanova further complicates his life. To those unfamiliar with the Soviet Union’s annexation of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and its aftermath, the author, who grew up in Toronto’s Latvian community, offers a mini history lesson. Kalns swings effortlessly from writing about the KGB’s tactics and brutality to detailing Gustavs’ worries about what to wear on his first date with Tatyana. Elegant writing that on occasion becomes flowery is punctuated by humor. For example, when Tatyana notes that the cover of a magazine features Paulina Porizkova, Gustavs asks her if the model is Russian, and she answers: “Czech. Russian legs.” Discussions of nationalism and Russia’s need to be ruled by a “strongman” are timely. But health warnings go unheeded—everybody smokes like a chimney.

A hot take on the Cold War; highly recommended.