Siberian Light

A savage triple murder sets the scene for a novel that is at once a heart-pounding thriller, a breathtaking love story, and a journey into the world's last great wilderness.  In the tradition of Smilla's Sense of Snow and Gorky Park, Siberian Light captures a time and a place as it hurtles us from the stifling heat of a murder scene into the deep cold of the Siberian taiga.

Siberia, land of hope and desperation.  A place of unimaginable wealth, and unimaginable greed.  Against this backdrop, Gregori Nowek, the mayor of the small river town of Markovo, is ordered to investigate the killing of three men.  Two of them are members of his own militia.  The third is Andrei Ryzkhov, a man who has made a fortune from an American-financed oil exploration deal.  The investigation leads Nowek into a labyrinth of deception and ends with a terrible discovery: an old horror, long thought dead, has reemerged amid the frozen wastes of Siberia.

Gregori Nowek, amateur violinist, former oil geologist, is a man of reason.  He believes in law, even in a lawless nation.  And he still holds fast to a flicker of hope; hope for the future, and hope for himself.  It remains hidden, waiting to be ignited by Anna Vereskaya, an American ecologist and savior to the endangered Siberian tiger.

When Anna is named the prime suspect in Ryzkhov's murder, Nowek wants to believe she is innocent.  Anna has come to Siberia to study and save the great Siberian tiger.  Instead, she has found the dangerous edge of a brutal conspiracy that draws them both into a hunt for the truth, and a desperate race for survival.

Siberian Light captures the agonies of a nation catapulted into the twenty-first century from the deep sleep of communism.  From the intricate workings of a Siberian oil field to the bitter resolve of a gulag survivor, Robin White's magnificent novel pulses with unforgettable characters and astonishing detail.  As it careens toward a wild, violent chase across the frozen taiga, Siberian Light builds to an exhilarating climax--a staggering surprise--spellbinding until the final, unforgettable scene.

Robin White has been an oil-well roughneck, oil-well-logging engineer, science writer, community energy planner, and an architect by vocation, an instrument-rated pilot by avocation.  He has lived all over the United States and in Europe, including Russia and Siberia.  He now lives near Monterey, California, with his wife.