About midway in this novel (page 111 to be exact), Faith Zanetti, the protagonist, describes herself as follows: “But here I was, raddled and war-weary with nobody to love and nobody to love me…I felt empty and weary.” That is the feeling one gets from reading this far. Fortunately, from that point on, the story develops and the book becomes more interesting.
Faith is a foul-mouthed 35-year-old war correspondent on whom experiences have taken a toll. At age 19 she married a rather mysterious man in Moscow and a year later left him for England, a couple of days after a couple is murdered in an adjoining room to their own bedroom.. Now 15 years later she is assigned to her newspaper’s Moscow bureau. No sooner does she land, than the police haul her in for questioning about the old crime.
The reason the police are looking at her is the revelation that her husband, who is in a psychiatric prison after having confessed to the murder, has now recanted and accused Faith. When she goes to the prison, she discovers not her husband but an old friend and co-worker. Thus, Faith sets about to learn about the circumstances of the murder, in which she’s become a suspect.
There are a lot of unnecessary four-letter words strewn throughout the novel, perhaps in an attempt to portray the hard-boiled nature of the characters. But to one way of thinking, such language is unnecessary to such a great extent. There are some interesting descriptions of Moscow and life under the former Communist regime. Some advice: Skip the first 100 pages, and the novel assumes form. The background could have been summarized more briefly without detracting from the main mystery.
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Theodore Feit