Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0684854082, Hardcover)

Tolstoy would have approved of the way Michael Hetzer uses large chunks of recent Russian history to build his strong and poignant first thriller. Hetzer--who edited an English-language newspaper in Moscow from 1990 to 1995 and witnessed the vast changes that swept the country--begins his story in the 1980s, as American astrophysicist Katherine Sears and Russian colleague Victor Perov join for a research project and a love affair. Their relationship, already complicated by the fact that Victor's mother is a top government official, becomes even more dangerous when Katherine discovers that Victor's brother, Anton, didn't really die in Afghanistan but is a dissident being held prisoner in a psychiatric gulag.

Aided by a disillusioned KGB agent, Katherine and Victor begin a search for Anton that takes them not only to the vast wastes of Siberia but also back in time, into a mystery that began 40 years before. Hetzer uses the 1940s poetry of the marvelous Anna Akhmatova like background music--"We're not good at saying good-bye / We wander around, shoulders touching. / It's begun to get dark already, / You look vacant, I say nothing"--and it sets the perfect tone of guilt and regret. --Dick Adler