Too many suspects

Book: Moskva

Author: Jack Grimwood

Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh

Review made possible by: Penguin Random House

Christmas Eve 1985.

Red Square, Moscow.

The naked body of a young man – hardly more than a boy – is found frozen solid with the blood drained and missing the little finger on his right hand.

Soon afterwards, Alex Marston, the 15-year-old stepdaughter of the British Ambassador to Moscow, goes missing and newly-arrived army intelligence officer Maj Tom Fox is asked to help find her.

Fox is fresh from undercover operations in Belfast and believes the only way to find the girl is to shake his KGB tail and mingle with the real people of Moscow.

He makes friends with Dennisov, a bar owner veteran of Russia’s Afghanistan conflict, who has lost a leg and relies on the rusted strut of a helicopter as a prosthetic.

Then he is contacted by mafia leader Erekle Gabashville who goes by the nickname Beziki.

Beziki has a special interest in finding the girl.

It was his son who was left dead in Red Square and he believes that by finding the girl he will find the killer.

Not only that, he has another son who has also gone missing and might already have been killed.

Then there’s Maj Svetlana Milova who also seems keen to help and has the contacts to do so.

Fox seems to be making progress until he realises that all these people are linked to each other and the Soviet establishment and he suspects he may have become a puppet in a cover-up.

Because the discovery of the body in Red Square is not the beginning of the story, it’s the middle.

It starts in 1945 as the Red Army emerges from the east to take its revenge on the emaciated and shattered women and children of Berlin, raping and looting with the savagery of a rabid pack of dogs.

One man in particular is a sadistic killer and his particular brand of atrocity is echoed in the bodies of an increasing number of victims Fox encounters as he looks for Alex.

It is only when Fox realises the similarities and manages to get copies of photographs of the Berlin barbarity and the people involved that he understands why his strings are being jerked and starts to wonder whether he will get out of the investigation alive.

At that point his problem is not so much deciding who the killer is but who it isn’t.

There are too many suspects, all of whom are prepared to kill and have the means to do so to stop the photographs being made public.

Moskva is a superb thriller on several levels.

It’s bleak, it moves quickly and in the middle somewhere, when you think you’ve figured out whodunnit, you realise you haven’t.