A fast-paced but surface-level yarn about a Russian dissident set against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.
A young Russian takes his revenge on Stalin’s war machine in Smith’s debut novel.
The devout, humble Petrov grows up in a remote Siberian village where his father, Ankarov, was exiled many years ago by the Soviet government. Now, the Soviets are gone, replaced by the Russian Federation, though Vladimir Putin is displaying the same authoritarian tendencies as the old regime. When the Russian army attempts to draft the mechanically inclined Petrov to fight Putin’s war in Ukraine, Ankarov dies defending his son and Petrov kills three soldiers before escaping down the ice-choked Bureya River. “I am no hero,” he thinks as he considers the irreversible course his life has taken. “Am I really, in my true heart, a self-absorbed coward?” He finds shelter in a remote trapper’s cabin from Soviet times and spends the winter collecting pelts to barter his way across the border. While sleeping one night by the river, he’s nearly killed by a bear, surviving only due to the timely intervention of a Nanai fisherman and his family, who nurse the injured Petrov back to health. In a river town, he meets a Jewish man named Yoni Rabbivinovitz who looks quite a bit like him. It turns out that Yoni is Petrov’s twin brother—Petrov was born to the Rabbivinovitzes and sold to his adoptive parents without the consent of his birth family. Yoni has just been drafted and is to report to training camp. Petrov decides to take his brother’s place, train with the army, travel to the front lines, and defect to the Ukrainian side. He succeeds—though not without taking a parting bullet in the shoulder from his former comrades. Once he’s crossed over to the Ukrainians, Petrov’s wild story draws the attention of the CIA, who are willing to bring him to America with the understanding that he’ll help with “any project that would help defeat Putin’s objectives.” Little does Petrov know just how explosive such a project might be.
Smith tells Petrov’s story in direct, declarative prose that reflects his protagonist’s action-oriented personality. It makes for entertaining reading, particularly once Petrov ends up in the strange land of America: “Stopping for gas at a Chevron fuel plaza on the interstate, Petrov watched as a man in a station wagon pulled up nearby and got out to fuel his vehicle while his wife and two children went inside. The man had a pistol on his hip, while those who were wearing military uniforms were unarmed.” The plot moves so quickly that the author has little time to establish his characters or explore Petrov’s interiority. The result reads almost like an extended treatment for a screenplay rather than a novel as increasingly unlikely events pile up without making any real emotional impact. Upon the story’s conclusion, readers will not be left with the sense that they’ve learned much of anything meaningful about the conflict or the people caught up in it.
A fast-paced but surface-level yarn about a Russian dissident set against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781967375929
Page Count: 220
Publisher: The Quippy Quill INC
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
