Dispatch from a Cold Country

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.

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.