Livres Vodka

Boris Starling's third thriller Vodka continues the run of excellence that started with Messiah. For the last decades of Soviet communism, there existed a weird symbiosis between officialdom and organised crime; Vodka offers an inventive description of what happened in the early years of democracy when that antagonistic partnership broke down. Alice Liddell could not be more of an innocent--her very name tells us that she is out of her depth, in Wonderland--and she gets lumbered with the job of privatising Moscow's largest vodka factory. Struggling with her alcoholism in a society where hard drinking is universal, Alice is caught up in the gang warfare between the distillery's Mafia boss Lev and his Chechen rivals. Meanwhile, someone is stealing children from an orphanage Lev protects and the KGB man who acts as his deputy is playing sinister games of his own. Vodka offers an intelligent and well-informed take on Russian politics?-all the more so, paradoxically, for changing some of the details and names of what happened in real life. The relationship between Lev and Alice is genuinely touching?he is the hard man who discovers there is somebody he cares about, the woman for whom falling in love is a destructive ravishment. --Roz Kaveney