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

2008-05-25 Too much going on

I have to agree with many of the reviewers, this book is too big and tries to cover too much of a subject. A story set in post glasnost would be good, a killer loose in Moscow would be good, but not both together. I read it to the end, all 650 pages of it, but the leaps were too much at times. It was hard to get my head around the Russian names, which were thrown at you all the time, and the history, production and differences in vodka became tedious after a while. Apart from anything else, I don't drink ... The blurb on the back cover indicated a fast paced thriller. It isn't. It could have been. I like Boris Starling's work usually, this was a disappointment. Check the sales figures above, 112 second hand copies for sale, that says it all really. Sorry, Boris, try cutting the book length in half next time and pick one subject to concentrate on. It's always tempting to throw everything in, including empty vodka bottles, but it doesn't work. Less is more, especially in thriller writing.