The Book Depository The Holy Thief by William Ryan
598 ratings
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Price: £7.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: The Holy Thief : Paperback : PAN MACMILLAN : 9780330508407 : : 04 Mar 2011 : Introducing Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev, and an outstanding new voice in historical crime fiction...
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780330508407
MPN: 9780330508407
GTIN: 9780330508407
Author: Saturnicus
Rating: 5
Review: A first novel from a promising talent. William Ryan captures, one would imagine, the atmosphere and situation in 1930's Moscow in an enjoyable thriller. Set in the rise of the new regime in the USSR, Korolov is for want of a better word, a detective looking into a series of gruesome murders. Is it a maniac, or is State Security behind them? I will not go into the story and spoil a super read for anyone. Mr Ryan has thoroughly researched his subject and has a produced a novel which is easy to read. The characters are well rounded and likeable, well some of them are, and there is even a thread that is relatively amusing in there somewhere. I found the description of the football game very believable. I am hoping that we are going to meet Captain Korolev again and eagerly await a sequal. The nearest I ever came to Moscow was Leningrad, now reverted to its old name St. Petersburg. I visited in the 1960s and I can see where our author is coming from, though his story is set thirty years earlier in the aftermath of the Great War and the Revolution. I was there after yet another horrible was and the similarities were considerable. Well worth a read. you will not be disappointed.
Author: Nicola Taunt
Rating: 3
Review: Soviet police detective Alexei Korolev is assigned to solve the gruesome murder of a young woman, whose mutilated body is found in an abandoned church. The case is difficult from the start, but it's made even harder because this is Moscow in 1936 where Stalin is in charge and Russians are denouncing everyone from their dog to their mother to try and save themselves from the regime. Korolev is an experienced detective, a veteran of the German and civil war. He's a man of contradictions. He believes in the Soviet system, but he's unable to let go of his pre-revolutionary belief in God. At heart, Korolev is a good man trying to do a proper job, but he's constrained by the oppressive, dangerous nature of Soviet Russia during the Great Purge, where no-one trusts anyone else. I found the prose clunky at times and the story is neatly wrapped up by flashes of convenient brilliance from Korolev, where he comes up with the answer to various parts of the mystery apparently out of thin air. The villain of the piece is fairly obvious from early on (as are some other twists) and there are a couple of occasions where I wish Korolev hadn't squeaked out of a tight spot quite so easily. In one scene towards the end of the book, one of the baddies seems to be changing sides, then something happens that stops that possibility in its tracks. I thought that was a shame as it would have been a more interesting tale than what actually transpires. I wasn't as impressed with this book as I wanted to be or as I thought I would be, but I might pick up another Korolev novel. It's very well researched, and I hope that some of the clunkiness of the writing will disappear as Mr Ryan learns his trade
