Dispatch from a Cold Country - Hardcover

Cullen, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449912582 ISBN 13: 9780449912584

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1996

Synopsis

An award-winning journalist with twenty years of experience in Washington and Moscow, Robert Cullen has won critical acclaim and a wide readership as a novelist. Now, in Dispatch from a Cold Country, Cullen unfolds a riveting story of murder, greed, high-stakes crime, and corruption at the highest levels of power in today's Russia.
Though recently promoted from reporter to editor at The Washington Tribune, Colin Burke has few illusions about life. It's a cold, hard fact: the closer things get to Burke, the more detached he becomes. Then Jennifer Morellione-- his eager, young protégé--places an urgent, breathless call from Frankfurt. Morelli has stumbled onto the story of a lifetime in St. Petersburg, and she has film to back up her findings. The subject is too hot to discuss over the phone, but she wants Burke to publish the story. They arrange to meet in Washington, D.C., that night.
She never makes the meeting. And to find out why, Burke returns to Russia--where he had put in long, hard years as a reporter--and tries to piece together the story that Morelli uncovered.
As Burke gropes through the dark, seedy maze of Russian politics, he suspects that the Hermitage, a place of pure beauty filled with the world's most breathtaking art, is at the center of the dark scandal Morelli was about to expose. He follows his hunch and becomes involved with a ravishing African-American woman named Desdemona McCoy, a Petersburg art gallery owner who may be more than she appears. Their passionate, tumultuous love affair is but one more strange twist in a tangled web of betrayal and clandestine maneuvering. For what Burke discovers blows all his expectations out of the water: a crisis that could explode the fragile Russian government.
Writing with an insider's intimacy about the uses and abuses of power, Robert Cullen brings to life the intersecting worlds of art, espionage, and politics. A spellbinder of a book, at once deeply literate and relentlessly exciting, Dispatch from a Cold Country propels Robert Cullen into the top ranks of suspense writers.

About this title

About the Author

A reporter abroad and in Washington, D.C., for two decades, Robert Cullen won an Overseas Press Club award for foreign reporting during his stint as Newsweek's Moscow correspondent. His novels include Cover Story and Soviet Sources, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of The Killer Department, which was made into an HBO original movie under the title Citizen X. Cullen makes his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He can be reached on-line at 71370.1620@compuserve.com.


From the Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

ning journalist with twenty years of experience in Washington and Moscow, Robert Cullen has won critical acclaim and a wide readership as a novelist. Now, in Dispatch from a Cold Country, Cullen unfolds a riveting story of murder, greed, high-stakes crime, and corruption at the highest levels of power in today's Russia.
Though recently promoted from reporter to editor at The Washington Tribune, Colin Burke has few illusions about life. It's a cold, hard fact: the closer things get to Burke, the more detached he becomes. Then Jennifer Morellione-- his eager, young protégé--places an urgent, breathless call from Frankfurt. Morelli has stumbled onto the story of a lifetime in St. Petersburg, and she has film to back up her findings. The subject is too hot to discuss over the phone, but she wants Burke to publish the story. They arrange to meet in Washington, D.C., that night.
She never makes the meeting. And to find out why, Burke returns to Russia--where he had put in long, hard ye

Reviews

The third Colin Burke international thriller (Soviet Sources, 1990; Cover Story, 1994) has our intrepid reporter taking one of those dangerous Hitchcock travelogues, in this case to the troubled St. Petersburg of the new Russia. The MacGuffin is a Leonardo painting called Madonna Litta, presently owned by the great Hermitage art museum but about to be sold secretly, with many payoffs, to a Colombian drug lord for $400 million. If the nefarious deed were made public, it could rock the government. Jennifer Morelli, Burke's young freelance prot‚g‚, who has film and facts on the potential scandal, calls him from Frankfurt, planning to meet him at the Washington Tribune. But Jennifer's been followed from Russia by the Hermitage's creepy Ivan Bykov, who likes to combine pleasure (sexual sadism) with business (he kills her). Burke discovers her mutilated body, feels personally responsible, takes time off from the Tribune, and flies to St. Petersburg to find out who killed Jennifer and why. (Her murder would seem to be connected to the recent death of the Hermitage's director.) Along the way, the satisfyingly complex storylines include (1) our not-so-innocent Burke abroad; (2) Desdemona McCoy, young, attractive, black, feisty, and a field operator for the agency in Langley, who returns to St. Petersburg to monitor that sale; (3) Andrusha Karpov, in Italy to find Florentine ocher for Nadyezhda Petrovna, who's painted a brilliant copy of the Madonna Litta; (4) art broker Charles Hamilton Merrill, who's arranging for drug lord Rafael Santera Calderon to buy the Leonardo; and (5) Russian mafia boss Slema Chavchavadze. Before the end, things heat up between Desdemona and Burke as they and their trio of allies try to survive a lot of cruel, greedy, mean men. Cullen's latest is good enough--aside from the occasional clich‚ and the seemingly obligatory genre romance--that one wishes to call it a fine novel instead of an effective page-turner. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Where can the Hermitage find much-needed dollars? Sell a masterpiece for millions and then cover the illegal sale with an "authentic" forgery. Jennifer Morelli, a new American correspondent, discovers the plot but is murdered before she can submit the scoop to Colin Burke, a former Moscow-based journalist (and star of the author's Cover Story, LJ 5/1/94) who is now deputy foreign editor for the Washington Tribune. Feeling responsible, Burke takes a leave from his new job and travels to St. Petersburg to investigate. This dangerous crusade brings him into the path of numerous people with other agendas, including a well-armed Colombian art buyer, various Russian factions, and an attractive undercover C.I.A. agent. The multiple perspectives defuse suspense and keep the witty, likable Burke off-stage more than some readers may like. Yet series hallmarks such as a strong sense of place and fast pacing make this a priority purchase for fiction collections.
V. Louise Saylor, Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., Cheney
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0449912582
• ISBN 13: 9780449912584
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 409