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My Mad Russian

THREE TALES

A trilogy of dense, exciting novellas about American love and greed in different eras.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
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Meyers (Wedding on Big Bone Hill, 2014, etc.) offers a collection of three novellas concerning romance and wealth.

The first, titular tale begins in 1933. In it, a wealthy banker named Max Berlin and his private investigator are concerned about the fact that Soviet agents have kidnapped Berlin’s tenant—an eccentric Russian inventor on the cusp of launching a lucrative new technology. This scene leads into Berlin’s account of the changes in art and society in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s; his marriage to the independent-minded Dora; and her infatuation with the mad Russian scientist. In Big Luck, set in the first decade of the current century, Mexican immigrant Ricardo is reluctant to seek American citizenship due to his occupation as a live-in catamite for a wealthy Iranian exile. When Ricardo’s lover breaks off the arrangement, he must find a new way to support himself, and he’s lured into a scheme to hide an acquaintance’s lottery winnings as tax-deductible gambling losses. In Sidestep, a college dropout goes to work for a wealthy friend of her father’s in an Ohio college town that the friend’s family has dominated for generations. She quickly falls into her new benefactor’s bed, but rumors about his wealth, and his sexual history, begin to concern her. Meyers is a masterly communicator of place, whether it be Manhattan of the 1930s or Los Angeles of the 2000s. Most impressively, he’s able to lock into the language and attitudes of each time and location. For example, Berlin narrates in the stodgy, judgmental declarations of a man of his class and generation: “The process of waking up to life is painful, and one our civilization feels it best to postpone, and which children themselves are happy to push off as long as they can.” The breadth of geography and history that Meyers covers keeps the collection varied and engrossing, and he has a knack for splashing a story with just enough mystery to keep readers plowing ahead. These novellas make an impression, and the only way to recover from one is to dive into the next.

A trilogy of dense, exciting novellas about American love and greed in different eras.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1634902403

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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CONCLAVE

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

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