This firsthand account of the Chechen War is light on politics but heavy on the grim reality of mindless killing.
Conscripted into the Russian army, a rebellious 18-year-old bent on fleeing military service has his attitude adjusted when he is forcibly detained, subjected to dehumanizing training tactics and sent off to fight in Chechnya.
In Siberian Education (2011), Lilin wrote of growing up among criminals in the small Soviet republic of Transnistria. Here, as "Nicolai," he presents a fictionalized first-person account of his horrific experiences in the Chechen War. His cockiness cooled by a few days in a hellish prison, the young draftee quickly rises in the ranks thanks to his hunting and target-shooting experience and frightening proficiency with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. After acclimating to his new existence collecting dead body parts from a bloodstained landscape, he becomes a member of the "saboteurs," an elite group whose primary function is to shoot opposing forces in the head from a safe distance. The enemy is mainly small Islamic units wreaking havoc on the Russians. The book documents the conflict, scene by brutal scene, in straightforward fashion, reaching maximum grisliness when Nicolai's gonzo superior matter-of-factly cuts the skin off a captured soldier with a knife. The narrative is full of memorable images: "heads shattered like ceramic vases," deaths "poor in movement" because of the speed and suddenness of the sniper's bullet. "The rhythmic sound of the bullets...made me feel the calm and comfort you feel when you climb into a bed with clean, warm sheets after a day of being tired and cold," Nicolai says. As powerfully observed as this book is, its straightforward approach is a bit of a letdown following an opening that promises a more cutting, offbeat, Catch-22–style antiwar commentary. Happy to transcend grunt status, Nicolai buys into the camaraderie among soldiers and derives satisfaction from doing his job well. His descriptions of a sniper's existence sometimes take on the casual tone reminiscent of the voiced-over spy tips on the TV show Burn Notice.
This firsthand account of the Chechen War is light on politics but heavy on the grim reality of mindless killing.Pub Date: May 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08211-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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